Andy Collins at Massimo Audiello - New York, New York - Brief Article

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Bill Arning

For his first solo show, emerging painter Andy Collins (who was still in school when he was spotted by art dealer Audiello) shows considerable facility, even charm, but also a certain lack of gravity often associated with less seasoned artists. The seven paintings on view, all untitled and from 1998, could be described as a type of biomorphic abstraction. But, like many younger painters, Collins seems to try to slip between conventional descriptive categories. All seven are dominated by expanses of flat, smooth and shiny monochrome grounds. The palettes are a fashionable selection of sherbet pinks and yellows, as well as institutional powder greens and blues. Four are perfect squares and the remaining three slightly off-square; the format, combined with the centered, symmetrical compositions, gives each a certain iconic weight. The painterly events were inspired by subtle passages discovered in fashion photographs, which Collins translated through a series of graphite drawings. The resulting works evoke their sources without depicting them.

The type of image fragment that attracts Collins most seems to be folds and gaps, the places where cloth wrapped around a model's body either imitates the topography of its wearer or opens to show a bit of flesh. In fashion, these are the moments of seduction, and the artist seizes on the allure of those folds and gaps, but, by isolating them like laboratory specimens, he teases out an implicit nastiness, too. In their jaggedness, some of the gaps seem like visceral rends in the surface of the picture. Other illusionistically modeled folds swell up to become rather horrific protuberances. Yet, after a decade of generally tough depictions of bodily decrepitude by a variety of prominent artists, Collins seems aware enough to know that a lighter touch may be needed today. Often the bulbous forms swell in hilarious ways, and the sunshiny colors combined with the salacious undertone left me with a smile, albeit a nervous one.

Collins has a way to go to carve out his own turf. His overall practice seems a bit too near to Carl Ostendarp's loopy abstractions and even closer to the recent abstract/figurative hybrids of Gary Hume. Distinctive, however, is his ability to balance charm with a dose of noxious associations, to temper his luxurious eye candy with a healthy sense of impoliteness. He will need more than that to hold our interest in the long run, but this exhibition shows him to be a young painter with a steady platform on which to build.