Chamberlain/Moses;
Ferlinghetti
John
Chamberlain & Ed Moses/L.A. Louver
Lawrence Ferlinghetti/William Turner Gallery
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John
Chamberlain treats painted and chrome-plated steel like paper. It's an
amazing technique, almost incredibly dapper. You can see it most tremendously
applied in The Big One (1993), where the metal chromatisms are wrought
like papier-mâché or wet rags, producing an effect of concentrated wit
and subtlety to match Beverly Pepper's droll conundrums. The range can be
seen in two new works of similar scale, Trollop Trombone Concert and
Virgin (2001), where a tantalizing color variation and a comical
application figure the theses satirically; the masterpiece is Lovenest over the Body Shop (1992), which
vibrates the whole palette. |
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Ed Moses is a cunning painter, and the simple
elements of this batch from 2001 combine to make obstinate pictures in slabs
of copper, gold, silver, black and rust on raw backgrounds, with the magpie
in him echoing Kline and Francis, often picking up a note from Herbert Creecy's Shaking Shanty paintings, planes of
obscuring color building up masses on a neutral or recessive background, with
play of gloss and matte. |
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Upstairs are
three great works by Ed & Nancy Kienholz: Drawing for the Jesus Come
(1982-83) and Drawing from Angel (1990), the former an open Cornell box
and the latter a 3-D presentation piece; Drawing for the Hoerengracht
No. 11 (1987) is another Cornell box with a hand to open it and a light on
it. Joe Goode's large oil, See No Evil (2000), is not a study of clouds but
cloud representations, and from a distance has a nice Tiepolo effect. Peter Shelton's tall bronze blackmonkey (1999-2000) is an elongated abstract
nude form, and John McCracken's Untitled (1982) is a plank of pure red
leaning against a wall.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti puts paint together on canvas to achieve a picture
effect, with a simple idea that stands for the image (Liberty #1,
1992-1999), or replaces it with a monogram (Hypocrite Post Modern, Pass By!,
1995). This is altogether what Arnold Schoenberg's pictures must be like, the
work of a spare-timer who knows the business.