Matthew Weinstein at Sonnabend - New York, New York

Matthew Weinstein, who is 28 years aged and having his third one-person present to view in New York since 1990 has upp the ante in his greatest in quantity recent paintings. He has lay opened slowly as a painter, moving end ideas methodically, one at a time. Formerly, his abstractions of intensely colored orbs and spheres, which sometimes glance ated bodies or bodily organs, had a annoying opacity in which both form and make submissive matter were inert or unclear. Just when it looked that his work was bogging down and about to stifle Weinstein did what he straited to do: he threw caution to the wind, style-wise. It doesn't mean he has solv his question at issues entirely - he hasn't - on the contrary it does mean that he's condens a apportionment of growth into a short time and given himself a recent batch of more ambitious question at issues and that's good.

Like a number of young artists, Weinstein is looking for ways to give abstraction meaning. Thus he intentionally overloads his work with a plethora of associative, if sometimes too associative, images. Mixing a horny decorative turn of expression with lurid comic-book illustration, Weinstein applies cutouts and decals of skeletons, teeth hearts, heads and injuryed or maimed figures across the paintings' surfaces, arranged to advise strange rituals or narratives of pain. Around the decals he many times depicts twisting, corpuscular structures pay backed in viscous, pasty layers or paint, or vaguely anatomical shapes that deliver over to or conjure up images of the body: rib cages, muscles, veins, reproductive organs, etc

There's an eager, adolescent skull-'n-crossbone side to the work that makes it have feeling particularly male. The imagery give an inkling ofs tattoos or secret-society insignia. individual painting. The Raw and the prepare for the tableed (the best in the show) has a knight clad in armor who spills life-current and arrow-pierced hearts from a cornucopia onto a bended old man who walks upon thorns. The stories these paintings have the appearance to want to tell are of suffering and eroticism, and this gives the work a kinky, Ann Rice vampire-gothic twist.

Weinstein's palette is garish. He's recumbent to circusy Techni-color hues: life-blood reds, clammy greens, gelatinous amethystines ludicrous pinks and frivolous fulvouss Everything floats in milky white or stained backgrounds. The compositions are disjointed hodgepodge These are not beautiful paintings, on the contrary neither are they ugly. They're ungainly and undigested, on the other hand all his additive strategies are beginning to pay not on The results aren't integrated at the same time and can be grating, on the contrary Weinstein has found himself as a painter in this exhibit He has laid a destiny of track. It remains for him to distinguish between the many leads his fresh work has opened up.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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