First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

Within a given installation, Walker may take you from a design object to a political poster to a travel advertisement ("Visit the Bermuda Triangle"), so that "the viewer is forced to shift gears in thought." This is, after all, an artist who has made everything from a mirrored Rorschach test (I see a butterfly shaped thing, 2001) to a movable wall on a serpentine ceiling track. Now he's threatening to build-full-scale, mind you--that semidestroyed pool. I can see the water rushing down as we speak.

BOB NICKAS, a longtime champion of the work of emerging artists, has curated nearly forty shows of contemporary art in the United States and Europe over the past decade and a half. A frequent contributor to Artforum and Dutch, he also writes a regular column for Purple, the Paris-based journal of art and culture. This past fall, Nickas taught "Critical Issues," a seminar in the MFA program at Columbia University in New York, and he is currently organizing "From the Observatory," a group show that will open at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in March.

Robert Storr On JERALD IEANS

JERALD JEANS ISN'T A NOVICE, BUT HE'S PRETTY MUCH new to New York. I first saw his work almost a decade ago in several private collections in his hometown of Saint Louis and at the local gallery that represented him. There, in 1993, he appeared in a group show alongside Julian Lethbridge, Glenn Ligon, and Christopher Wool, among others. His closest affinities were with the elegant Johnsian painterliness of Lethbridge--and, by association, that of Richmond Burton and Terry Winters--rather than the grittiness of Ligon and Wool. Back then, Ieans's paintings came in two basic varieties, both insistently material, both exquisite in their fashion. The first and larger body of work consisted of tinted waxen canvases covered with subtly tonal ellipses in loose but even distribution. The more surprising paintings--the second type--were plywood reliefs coated with translucent, seemingly still-gooey layers of Elmer's glue over which were stenciled similar ellipses in cake-frosting-rich oil pigment. The former were delib erate, nuanced, and lovely, but I liked the latter best because of the pronounced discrepancy between optical allure and slightly repellent tactility.

Ieans's most recent work is all suavity, all optical seduction, but it has paid off its debts to Johns, Lethbridge, et al. and assumed a more expansive aspect. Seen last season in Thelma Golden's "Freestyle" exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, these large-format abstractions are made up of looping biomorphs superimposed one on another as if Silly Putty in drop-dead shades of blue, green, salmon, beige, and brown had been shot out of a pump-action splatter gun. In fact, leans draws fatty paint across the picture plane in brush-grained sheets whose outward spread is contained by hard-edged French curves. Visible under each of these layers is the contour and grain of the layer that preceded it, so that the whole composition shivers not only where the edge of one monochrome blob skirts or overlaps the edge of another, but in the silken abrasion that takes place, so to speak, "between the sheets." Meanwhile colors have their history, and if Ieans's forms recall the Surrealist-influenced work of Elizabeth M urray or Carl Ostendarp, the moody hues he currently favors are closer to those of Jazz Age muralist Aaron Douglas--muted chromatic echoes emblematic of Ieans's sophistication.