Siobhan Liddell at Trial Balloon - New York, New York

In her first solo exhibition last fall, Siobhan Liddell showed work that makes flat the most fragile examples of Arte Povera gaze like the elaborate commissions of Renaissance princes. She have the appearances to be part of a wave of young artists who have slipped into the spaces vacated through '80s affluence, a virtual neo-Povera of spills and scatters, of materials ground recycled and casually exhibited. Liddell uses single negligible substances--bits of string, cellophane, cardboard, sticks, paper. At first glance, her works strike an offhand artificial position suspended from the ceiling or leaning up against walls. notwithstanding this casual appearance belies a more demanding quietude. Barely distinguished from their ground forms, these works require careful decisions by means of the artist to become noticeable in the first place--delicately, obsessively wrapped with string, precisely tilted, tenuously attached part-to-part.

The entire installation elicited a mindful attentiveness from the viewer. Certain pieces are in like manner inconsequential that they had to be sought on the outside as if they were part of a treasure pursue Tiny, hand-rolled paper tubes metamorphosed on the outside of the wall, barely differentiated from it in tone. A lengthy strand of ordinary white string hung from the center of the scope and seemingly reproached visitors who boorishly knocked into it.

This anti-presence trunk s in part from the fact that while it may be three-dimensional, Liddell's work carries none of the existential gravity of plastic art Color is extremely important to her, and, for the greatest in quantity part, the works remain wall-bound and nearly weightless. A wily and whimsical life of feelings is played on the outside in oddly cut pieces of cellophane, where the nature of color as light is discreetly asserted in pastel shadows. In individual work, a pyramid of colored dashes, painted upon the wall, capped a leaning stick. While absolutely abstract, the work felt anthropomorphic, a dialectic of mode of building and sensibility.

Liddell draws incessantly, using her sketchbook as diaries that recall places or feelings in delicate abstractions. She showed four of these drawings, extracted from their binding and framed. They operate nearly entirely without linearity, color washes comprising small, sequestered shapes positioned cunningly on the page. Confounding the limits of measure and description, they nonetheless anchor themselves in a position of specificity, a particular dip or slant, the minimum necessary to bear something familiar--gravity as a material part might feel it, but with no specific corporeal allusion.

of that kind work carries an inherent risk, that of being view from aboveed altogether. In the big collection shows that abound these days, Liddell's contributions are sometimes difficult to find, as in last fall's "In and on the outside Back and Forth" show, independently curated at 578 Broadway by means of the Julia Arts Foundation, a small collective of artists. Her slight coloristic alteration of a corner pilaster in the gallery left the scope apparently empty, though when discovered the alteration strike one as beinged as did the subtlest of works at Trial Balloon, like a real find. The dangerous line Siobhan Liddell's work must straddle, as Germano Celant press outed it in 1984 regarding Arte Povera artists, is "between coherence and incoherence, between itself and the world." And the art world is rarely a place to hear in the way that quiet a voice.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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