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Yigal Ozeri at Stefan Stux - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Elizabeth Schambelan
Throughout his two-decade-plus career, Israeli-born painter Yigal Ozeri has engaged in a productive dialogue with the work of the old masters, particularly Velazquez. This engagement has led him to an interest in the esoteric world of art restoration. In "Tikkun: The Restoration Series," his recent show at Stux, Ozeri showed new works that elucidate the process of restoration, both as a practice and as the metaphor for a dynamic exchange between secrecy and transparency. For Ozeri, the marks inscribed on the back of a picture--scratches, discolorations and other ravages of time--constitute a unique visual record, a kind of secret history. In the "Restoration" series, he brings these histories to light.
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Primarily, the series consists of oil paintings on stretched canvas or on layers of silk tissue, though there are also etchings and mixed-medium drawings. Most of the works are based on source imagery culled from restorers' manuals, and many depict the backs of old, damaged pictures. Rust stains and watermarks, cryptic bits of old-fashioned handwriting and fading ink stamps: Ozeri renders all of these features with an obsessive eye for detail and a virtuoso's skill.
The paintings might almost be called trompe l'oeil, but each, in some way, causes the viewer to question that label. For example, Patch 1, a small, horizontally rectangular painting, registers at first as a geometric abstraction. Its flat, flaglike composition--vertical bands of color of varying widths, intersected by a perpendicular strip of white--seems to allude to Jasper Johns. Only upon close inspection does it become apparent that Patch 1 is actually a painting of a patch of gauze stretched across the back of a framed canvas.
Other paintings oscillate between illusionism and a more expressionistic style of depiction. Pandora's Box is a highly realistic painting of the woodpaneled back of an old Dutch picture. But Ozeri has superimposed a delicately limned oil sketch of a hanged man on the surface of the painting. The figure is difficult to situate spatially--is it floating on the picture plane, or set into a panel like a curio?--and the effect is eerie and disorienting.
None of the pieces in the show were framed; they were, instead, suspended on clear monofilament inside glass vitrines. The vitrines were set on pedestals, as if beckoning the viewer to walk around them to see what they look like from the back. But, tantalizingly, the paintings are set just a few inches from the wall, so that, in fact, their reverse sides are inaccessible. This mode of display asserts the fact that these works are things--corporeal, three-dimensional objects. Paradoxically, though, their presentation also lends them an ethereal quality. Floating in their clear glass cases, they maintain an oneiric separateness and evince an uncanny, self-contained power.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
