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gallery 1: ELLIOTT GREEN new paintings Elliott Green has returned to Postmasters
with a series of larger paintings that bring his strangely original figures
forward in a sober maturity. Through the use of an eccentric blend of colors
and a distinct, highly animated line, Green's characters interact with controlled
calm while visual hints of imminent eruption loom nearby. The artist's freestyle
approach - dark, graphite lines swiftly and adeptly defining distortions
of facial features, arms and legs - continues in this series. As Barbara
A. MacAdam of Art News described in reviewing Green's solo exhibition last
year, "His personal iconography offers a weird and effective vehicle for
expressing complex emotional states and relationships, both formal and figurative,
and the unidentifiability of the cartoon characters prevents sentiment from
becoming mawkish." In the current show, the increased canvas size has enlarged
Green's characters to human scale of up to six-and-a-half feet in height.
The already apparent exaggeration of body parts is taken to the extreme,
such as the monstrous foot of a man with a chiseled, movie-star physique
in "Tree Grips Tight to Fruit." The artistic license Green takes with anatomy
is so severe, it is remarkable that the human figure is recognizable. The
warping highlights the characters' idosyncratic weaknesses and strengths,
and unveils the otherwise hidden emotional mechanics of relationships. While
distortion and the strong flow of line define the figures' activities, the
scenes are painted in an anachronistic palette of nostalgic post-war hues
and contemporary brilliant tones, color-coding the potential volatility
of different areas of the stage. In "Hold on Tight," a central figure in
murky marine blue clasps hands in seeming prayer, sandwiched by characters
bathed half in serene blues, half in blood-reds. The bookend figures, a
girl who mimics the pious gesture and a disruptive man, simultaneously lend
peacefulness and tension to the scene through the isolation of color. In
his new paintings, Green captures the presence of time as it works toward
a climax unforseen by the characters involved. Tiny details surrounding
the central images hint at what is to come: In "Gentle Mouth," lips softly
suck on a finger, while off to the side, something is growingSperhaps the
beginnings of a fetus, perhaps a tumor, but certainly it is a potentially
unsettling harbinger of change. The tranquil sensuality of the main action
remains intact for now, while in the background the growth has set transformation
slowly in motion. "Even as they tap into elemental desires and anxieties,
Mr. Green's easel sized canvases remain works of great formal elegance,"
wrote Ken Johnson in The New York Times, in a review of the 2000 show. Green's
latest paintings retain that strongly animated presence, but the energy
is tempered, disciplined, held in reserve. His protagonist is now one abstracted
beyond the visual reality of the figure: it is an offstage character, time,
who creates the present and prepares the future. |
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