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David Storey at CUE Art Foundation
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Paul Mattick
Although all the paintings in this exhibition were finished recently, some of them were started as long ago as 1985. But it's a key to the flavor of David Storey's work that these share the unlabored look of the just-made pictures, which, in turn, have the intellectual complexity and material finesse of a long-term project. Storey's painting seems both suspended out of (or over) time and emphatically, materially present in the present moment; it combines elements of classic modernist painting with a witty sensibility that bears witness to the time traveled since the grandiloquent hopes of modernism were last believable.
In nearly all the pictures, an interwoven set of quasi-figurative elements, typically mixtures of biomorphic and mechanical shapes outlined in black, occupies an allover grid structure defined primarily by color, ranging from strong flat primaries to exquisite grays, browns, greens, purples and pinks. In The Silver Spear, to take a particularly complicated example, two artistic orders sit side by side: to the left, a moderne-inflected Assyrian battle scene, with a figure on horseback plunging his spear into the area on the right, which is inhabited by a figure reduced to a schematic head, upthrust arms with metallic prosthetic fingers, and stick-figure legs (as well as a disturbing metallic "third leg"). The decorative elegance of the picture, with its armature of verticals and horizontals and its play of red and blue on the left against yellows and ochers on the right, matches without containing the pathos of the disassembled cartoon figure, pierced by an ocher spear that actually looks more like a paintbrush. It speaks at once of modernism's affinity for classicism and of the ironic distance it is now natural to feel toward both of those modes--the distance that used to be called "postmodernism."
One of the show's most effective paintings presents the same ideas in relatively stripped-down form: in The Dog's Clock, the timekeeper's gears have sprung, drifting across its circular surface, while the hands swell with life into multiple-headed arrows and curlicues like the legs of a Miro dog. Life is present also in the yellow-gold that nearly fills the image, with a depth and richness of color matched by shapes, layers and textures of the paint surface. The whole presents an amazing image of motion-in-stillness--or, perhaps, of life in the form of objecthood.
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