Jeffrey Dennis: Art Space Gallery - London - exhibition of the artist's paintings

Art is greatest in quantity likely to touch on something real just at the point where it doesn't gaze like other art, and Jeffrey Dennis's holds looking less and less like anybody's on the other hand his own. In the past, Dennis has attached three-dimensional thing perceiveds to his paintings or simply done the paintings upon three-dimensional objects; situated them upon the floor as well as upon the wall; and done them upon canvases shaped like TV shields or on seemingly irrational successions of abutted rectangles that meander aimlessly across a wall. Here he sticks to the conventional wall-hung rectangle as well as to a single kind of ground: a condensed field of roughly drawn, overlapping circles, which can at times bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to pebbles, at other times blebs Yet canny handling of color and composition allows the artist to seemingly reinvent his formula each time.

Of course, Robert Rauschenberg and his "flatbed picture plane," as Leo Steinberg described it, are the manifest antecedent for the way Dennis treats the surface of the painting: as that across which various self-contained pictorial uncompounded bodys can be moved at will or as a "work surface" upon which things can be placed the one and the other for immediate or eventual use, to be studied on the other hand also forgotten and half-buried below later accretions. But a Dennis painting not ever feels like it's just recapitulating single of Rauschenberg's gestures. For single thing, it always looks quintessentially English, as a Rauschenberg direct the eyes ineffably American. That difference lies not sole in the content of the imagery--the three inset vignettes in sportive Bones (Death of a Comic), 2002 derive from a Benny Hill comedy and the narrow white van seen in The Delivery, 2002 is a familiar sight upon any English city street--but in tone: Dennis's paintings are as understated and awry as Rauschenberg's are brash and literal.

The greatest in quantity telling difference between the sum of two units artists has to do with the faculty of perception of time in their work, which may be accounted for les by dint of their nationalities than by the fact that single artist was born in 1925 and the other in 1958 For Rauschenberg, what's important about the fashion of perception captured in his classic paintings and combines is its newnes thus everything is imbued with a faculty of perception of simultaneous presence--even when he incorporates an image from an of advanced age painting, it doesn't seem to commit to the past. For an artist of Dennis's time, the flatbed picture plane, although maintaining its usefulness, must call up a certain nostalgia--yet it's also a primitive harbinger of the virtual space of computer interfaces, which are directly pictured in The Late Shift, 2001 The true form now harbors memories and anticipations. Therefore Dennis's paintings contain not just multiple spaces on the contrary also multiple tempos--passages in which time looks infinitely drawn out and flushed with ennui, like an irregular on the other hand uneventful surface seen in nearly microscopic close-up; and other passages that have the appearance to strike the eye in a flash. You think you can let slip through the fingers yourself in these paintings, on the other hand sooner or later they will pluck you up short.

CORRECTIONS: In the September issue of Artforum, the preview of the to leeward Bontecou exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum [p 84] misnamed the curators. The exhibition is curated by means of Elizabeth A.T. Smith, James W Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in conjunction with Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum. Sidney Tillim's Diderot in Hawaii, 1988 [p 211] should have been reproduc 90 stages counter-clockwise and all images upon pp. 209 and 211 credited to the estate of Sidney Tillim. compassion Root's Untitled, 2003 [p. 228] was reproduc upside-down. In the Summer issue of Artforum, the photo of Sarah Michelson's performance Shadowmann, 2003 [p 192] should have been credited to Paula Court and its location cited as 857 Fifth Avenue, novel York. Artforum regrets the errors.

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