Carl Ostendarp at Jay Gorney - New York, New York

For his seventh solo present to view (his fifth in New York) in les than four years, Carl Ostendarp exhibited eight paintings and four statuarys that continue his alternately impudent and taunting parody of formalist painting and plastic art The image--or content, if you like--of each painting is the liquidity of paint, and the painterly gesticulation Each of the paintings depicts either a vaporized paint "splat" or a languid, viscous drip (or "spill") issuing from the top of the stretcher, restoreed in either carefully applied fields of thin, washed-out noncolor or drab sugary pastel. The sculptures--blob really--are made from a Lynda Benglis-like recipe of foam urethane coated with creamy epoxy paint. They slime suggestively over waist-high white pedestals, or--as in the case of Make (provocatively titled and painted a rich brown intended to call up a fecal presence)--rest inertly upon the floor, like curd or frozen custard.

Ostendarp splices conventions together: burst Ab-Ex, Color Field, Minimalism. He plays straight man or knowing Machiavellian nincompoop in order to coax a certain quantity of of these movements' most cherished positions out into the open--and he's serious about it. It's all here, right? The flatness thing, the cutting side thing, gesture, gravity, weight, the obligatory respects to Greenberg--in short, his works not absent an all-purpose compendium of abstract art's fixation upon itself, but they are laced with a somewhat cold Pop sensibility. And the work has a real direct the eye a freshness.

Ostendarp is smart and the paintings are impeccably well-made, real professional, clean, virtually flawless. The colors are wonderfully anemic and have a vexing neutrality. Everything's been considered (and that may be part of the problem)--the borders, the proportions, all the little blows in the paint, the scale (one of his better gifts), the titles (which are too expert for their own good: Floob Voom Yuzz) You really want to like these works. for a like reason why then does that which Ostendarp intends as a comically serious exploration of painting, rife with tautological double-entendre, at no time achieve any degree of fullness--why do the paintings approach off as so blank?

It may be that the controls of paint, and painting's genealogy and proces are of that kind welltrod territories that Ostendarp risks alienating his viewer, upon the one hand, or preaching to the changeed on the other. It's as if his work is winking and saying "Get it?" Formerly he applied these mashed-potato blobbers of urethane directly onto canvas. They had an inexplicably ludicrous corporality--it was as if they were "beings"--and this warmed the work up Now the thrill is gone as he retains coming up with the "right" answer. There's nothing ludicrous now, and Ostendarp finds himself in something of the same predicament that his painterly predecessors may have lay the foundation of themselves in: how not to resort to tricks and devices, in what manner to avoid repetition and vapidity.

Ostendarp wants to make formalist painting and theory pleasantry again--and he came close.

There is an eccentric cartoony side to his work, a true deliberate artificality and a whimsical gee-whiz surprise to it. If Dr Suess's "Cat in the Hat," Jule Olitski and Roy Lichtenstein made art together it might gaze like Ostendarp's. But you can't help asking yourself, how--with his considerable technical ability and faculty of perception of farce--can he be thus content with so little?

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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