Ange Leccia.Ange Leccia says his work falls somewhere "between Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian," referring to the former's frenetic energy and the latter's ordered precision. Each piece in this sprawling but thematically concise show bore the laconic la·con·ic adj. Using or marked by the use of few words; terse or concise. See Synonyms at silent. [Latin Lac title Arrangement (as do all his works), a direct reference to the artist's technique of "arranging" objects or events while drawing from installation art, performance, sculpture, video, "art photography," and documentation. Past Arrangements included filling a gallery with police motorcycles, placing bulldozers in a face-off in front of a neoclassical ne·o·clas·si·cism also Ne·o·clas·si·cism n. A revival of classical aesthetics and forms, especially: a. A revival in literature in the late 17th and 18th centuries, characterized by a regard for the classical ideals of reason, form, building, and positioning Concorde jets nose-to-nose at Charles de Gaulle Airport, as well as the Cibachromes documenting these events. Because many of these works make conspicuous use of spanking-new, brand-name consumer products, Leccia has been lumped with the "commodity artists" of the '80s. He now seems to be phasing out products qua products, making it clear he's a formalist at heart. In the first half of the show, technology and the great outdoors collide. In a deadpan 1990 Cibachrome, the white wake of an enormous ship recedes like a Barnett Newman Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. "zip" into the horizon. A work from 1987 documenting side-by-side ships in New York Harbor New York Harbor, a geographic term, refers collectively to the rivers, bays, and tidal estuaries near the mouth of the Hudson River in the vicinity of New York City. This is sometimes construed in the sense "the Ports of New York and New Jersey". posits the zip as the thin vertical space between the hulls. In a 15-foot-high video projection of waves crashing against the coastline of the artist's native Corsica, Leccia shifts the image 90 degrees so that the surf moves up and down rather than sideways, the slow-pulsing sinusoidal sinusoidal /si·nus·oi·dal/ (si?nu-soi´dal) 1. located in a sinusoid or affecting the circulation in the region of a sinusoid. 2. shaped like or pertaining to a sine wave. curves suggesting animated Morris Louis Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein) (November 28, 1912 - September 7, 1962) is a United States abstract expressionist painter, one of the many such painters to emerge in the 1950s. veils. Preserved in a pair of striking mural photographs, a mock battle staged by a military contractor to sell helicopters to the French government becomes a "found event." Violence turns geometric as a stately procession of orange explosions rips across the lush countryside near Valmy, France. In counterpoint to these plumes of smoke, cylindrical stacks of film canisters in a work from 1992 recall the integers of Minimalist sculpture and the towers of a modern skyline. Tape recordings of well-known movies and television shows--from The African Queen, 1951, to Twin Peaks, 1990--reverberate from inside the hollowed-out stacks, merging into dissonant dis·so·nant adj. 1. Harsh and inharmonious in sound; discordant. 2. Being at variance; disagreeing. 3. Music Constituting or producing a dissonance. , audio-action painting. Leccia's debt to Pollock and Mondrian suggests that his work also has a mystical or quasi-mystical basis: Pollock was influenced by Carl Jung and Mondrian by the theosophists. Leccia seems less interested in secular Marxist agendas than in probing a postindustrial post·in·dus·tri·al adj. Of or relating to a period in the development of an economy or nation in which the relative importance of manufacturing lessens and that of services, information, and research grows. Adj. 1. environment for presages of the apocalypse. On a video screen glimpsed through a hole punched in a wall of Orwellian cinder cin·der n. 1. a. A burned or partly burned substance, such as coal, that is not reduced to ashes but is incapable of further combustion. b. A partly charred substance that can burn further but without flame. blocks, Maria Callas takes the same breath over and over in slow motion, and in a related work of 1990 she's reduced to redundant images on ragged film strips. In both these works Leccia treats the diva's voice as an absence, as having vanished into the abyss. In the show's final Arrangement, 1992, crushed cinder blocks inside a concrete "well" surrounded a glowing picture tube. The "message" one expected to see in the baleful light never materialized. |
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