Mike Kelley: galleria emi fontana

While Mike Kelley is best known for his content-heavy installations and lowbrow aesthetic, for this exhibition he seemingly turn backed to his roots as an abstract painter. upon view were mostly two-dimensional, nonfigurative works from three series: "Memory Ware Flats," (2000-2003) "Carpet," and "Wood Grain" (both 2003-) The greatest in quantity decorative, the "Memory Ware Flats," are rectangular-shaped boards prepp with colored grout and then encrusted with intricately patterned beads, fake pearls, buttons, and sparkling plastic "jewels." (Ordinary household realitys covered with bits of advanced in years china, glass, and the like are known in North American craft circles as "memory ware.") The "Wood Grain" and "Carpet" paintings have more mut granting still very textured surfaces: The former are painted with thin washes of acrylic paint to create trompe l'oeil results while the latter are pieces of real plush carpet that have been overlayed with a single color of paint applied according to a proces similar to monotype printing.

In contrast to Kelley's past use of paint, usually subordinated to a larger conceptual whole, here he have the appearances to have given in to the bait of pure painterly effects: richness and variety of color and an attention to surface quality taking anteriority over any easily readable easy in mind But what makes these pictures greatest in quantity compelling, besides their obvious visual appeal, is Kelley's ability to isolate, recycle and rethink material and conceptual antecedents in his own oeuvre. The "Memory Ware Flats" are a clear example of this, with their craftlike materials--a mainstay of his work from the beginning--and their respects to memory, which first surfaced in his work during the mid-'90s when Kelley's interest in quelled Memory Syndrome became the impetus behind major throw outs like Educational Complex, 1995: types reconstructed from memory of the place of educations that the artist attended and the house he grew up in. Here, the use of the memory-ware technique not alone pokes fun (as Kelley did with his stuffed-animal pieces) at the emotional or nostalgic value nation invest in keepsakes and other inanimate particulars but validates an otherwise kitsch aesthetic through using it purely for its pictorial potential.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The "Wood Grain" works are similarly materials-related, referring to Kelley's fondnes for untreated wood-land (for example, Orgone, Shed and Colema Bench, the couple 1992) or painted simulations of it, like the fake wood-panel compass divider in the 1991 Madrid version of the installation Alma Pater (Wolverine Den) 1991 The knots and grains of the fresh paintings, however, are primarily in vibrant colors, and the shapes and sizes of the boards are closer in scale to easel paintings than to utilitarian facts Perhaps to offset this formal rather than functional impression, Kelley has added onto individual board a painted reproduction of his felt banner from 1990 calling an audition for someone to play the bard and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: a humorous on the contrary somewhat obvious nod to the show's primarily Italian public.

Kelley's critical impulse is more subdu in this material part of work, and one is proveed to think he has retrogradationed letting himself be seduced by dint of the pleasure of making beautiful pictures. What holds his art interesting, as in the past, is his willingness to consistently go [i]or[/i] come back to and deconstruct--with humor and intelligence--the art-historical status quo and his possess place within it; and he does this without allowing his self-referentiality to cros the line into narcissism.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group