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Andy Warhol’s
Camouflage Paintings Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills |
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There is a very
terrible drama in these paintings, or a lighthearted one. Nothing in them
which is not Government Issue, except the colors chosen. They don’t
mean anything, nothing is expressed (what is ever expressed, anyway?) beyond
certain formal relationships of color and form, line and plane. These often
have reference to other artists, Gauguin, Dubuffet, Albers, and of course
Matisse, among many others.
The middle range
has the iconographic isolation of a Creecy or a Kandinsky. The largest are a
tapestry mode, or a Vuillard wallpainting. But what is looked after by the
artist is the unexciting relationship, at first, between plane and
perspective, and then the two-color perspective indicating an active
principle, finally the overwhelming primacy of the descriptive mode as a
variable of contiguity, the sort of thing that is an aspect of visual
illusion.
A giraffe’s
head and shadow over a fried egg, an udder or glove under a branch, such
images suggest themselves at first, then there is the Mediterranean Sea,
various landscapes, etc. Impossible to know where you are, and that is where
the irreducible poetry, unascertainable, but not indeterminate, comes into
play. |
