John Coplans.

ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY 

With these recent works John Coplans shows a mastery of surface from which comes a singular beauty, Mozartian in its development: strong forms and specific emotions evolve swiftly, imperceptibly, mysteriously into others. The pictures' rhetorical modes (expository, lyrical, dramatic) vary rapidly and sharply, as do the pleasures of the surface (surprise, delight, astonishment, charm, wonder). Saving it all from being merely gorgeous are a knowledge of the body's expressiveness and a complex infrastructure of forms worked into inventive, overlaid abstract compositions. Thus, Coplans directs the imagination toward the contemplation of emotion, the understanding toward the nature of things.

These works are studies, two-to-three times life-size, of the standing male nude, short, potbellied, hairy, aging: Coplans himself - his sole subject since the early '80s (he is now 75). Each figure is made up, top to bottom, of three large prims (or cells) chest to midriff; midriff to mid thigh; mid thigh to ankle - and each comprises only one vertical panel in works of from two to four panels, for a total of 15 figures.

Coplans' mastery of surface derives from his filling the picture with the body and conceiving the backdrop as a wall. In earlier photographs, the backdrop was white surround, a metaphysical blankness, difficult to govern, often degenerating into vague grays without intentionality. Here, each unit - cell, panel, group - shows mostly skin and body parts; against a realistic wall, the figure casts realistic shadows; wall and shadow have solid, intentional shape complicitous with the body's poses. Coplans' will to form expresses itself everywhere, festive, triumphant.

A silvery glow, like that of recently polished old sterling, lends the surfaces the density, presence, and authority of painting. It also covers the figures in a silvery patina that is at once delicate and compelling. Body parts are simultaneously figure, ground, abstraction, and dramatic character; the body a set of endlessly shifting forms and emotions. A clenched fist is both an angry figure against a buttock's ground and an abstract element defining back and leg; subtle transitions model the body and create dark abstract lines, in folds of flesh and in the body's crevices; compositions in line, form, and black and white are at once distinct and collaborative; the figure is alternately shy, bold, angry, dejected, flirtatious, poised, self-mocking, in retreat, swaggering, nonplussed, majestic. There is no element in these works that does not play several esthetic and psychological roles. These are not 15 versions of Coplans' naked self but a crowd of emotionally discrete, engaging characters like those in Breughel's villages or Guardi's Venice.

Coplans has exchanged the autobiographical "John Coplans" of his earlier work for an Everyman with a past. For example, if as illustrators would have it, Dante's souls were naked, Coplans' pictures are studies for the Purgatorio. And if his work ever did express the relationship between Coplans and himself, it now expresses a larger one. Unconcerned with Coplans' ego, Coplans the model contends with experience broadly defined. Liberated, intelligent, curious, blithe, supple, and protean, he embodies any number of figures from everyday life. Coplans' engagement with his nakedness is not a man's concern with his aging body but an artist's concern for the universality of his imagery on the broadest plane. His nude is daily life stripped of its particulars.

- Ben Lifson