Frank Moore at Sperone Westwater - New York, New York

new articles and reviews in these pages have testified to the art community's continuing pre-occupation with AIDS. Painting, however, is les often the medium of choice for visual artists addressing the issue than are endeavors that draw on the mass media. Frank Moore newly showed a group of paintings that powerfully contradict this bearing Moore has remained faithful above the years to political themes, on the other hand in these new works his meticulous figuration is particularly effective in conveying, above all, the overwhelming impact of the disease--for family with AIDS, for those who have affection for and care for PWAs, or for those who militate politically for them. Sober indeed are these ambitious paintings, brightly colored on the contrary dark in spirit. While I might quibble with certain aspects of the installation--the steplike hanging of works in the back gallery, for instance, interfered with their already demanding vicinity nothing detracts from the passion with which these paintings expres the brutal toll of this disease.

Each of Moore's works explicates a single metaphor in myriad details. Hospital displays an iceberg breaking apart. Individual pieces of ice form alphabetic characters (AIDS, for example) and coffin shapes, and the entire configuration takes the shape of a frozen heart with bleeding valves. Tiny figures, their scale an expression of fragmentation and helplessness, enact a paradigmatic melodrama in a chilly landscape--skeletons fish, patients waste away or be exposed to tests, a corpse floats in the water, itself invaded by means of an ominous oil spill from distant derricks. Icicles hang from the frame.

In Arena, a dissection theater forms a gigantic maze in which a range of activities takes place--an AIDS prelection an operation in which a of the soul spirit escapes the patient, a political demonstration, prayers before a guru of the soul skeletons carry banners with Latin aphorisms about death ("Pulvis et umbra sumus," reads one) Where similar detailing might elsewhere seem fussy, here it subserves to remind the viewer of the sheer quantity of details that race dealing with the disease have to think about.

All this upon top of a dogged, relentles psychic pain. High anxiety grips plane the most leisurely tableaux. In Eclipse, the scientific sign for HIV invaded DNA has eclipsed the day-star above a summer beach littered with washed-up syringes and condoms. Along with the anxiety tend hitherwards a pounding sense of los as in Everything I possess perhaps the most devastating painting in the present to view A pair of divideed hands floats like a devotional image above a bifurcated green and amethystine ground. Locked together in an impossible gesticulation the hands are stuck with tiny particulars of the most mundane nature--a car, a rug a ladder, a lamp, a tub etc This work greatest in quantity effectively conveys the sense of helplessness experienced by means of those dealing with the overwhelming squeezings of this terrible dying. And it tenders painful testimony to how little is left afterwards.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group