Antonio Petracca at Kim Foster - New York - World Trade Centre commemorative exhibition

Since the mid-1990s, Antonio Petracca has been making paintings that bring the painted surface into "real" space, sometimes by using boxlike supports that protrude sculpturally from the wall, at other times displaying panels leaning on shelves or molding. His preferred subject matter has been urban architecture--often seen in skyline views, radically cropped with the surface blurred, presented on carefully constructed architectonic supports. Earlier works from 2000 show views of the World Trade Center and Rockefeller Center. This subject matter, combined with the fact that Petracca is a longtime resident of Battery Park City, make his newest paintings, all of the World Trade Center site post-9/11, seem both melancholic and sincere.

The only painting in the show that depicts the WTC towers still standing is a night view titled The Beacons (2001). It shows the top quarter of the buildings on an 8-by-72-inch panoramic structure which projects from the wall at an angle. On the top of this wooden box are Petracca's signature bright orange and red drips, traces of the ground he puts down before beginning to render the objects.

Two oil-on-panel works, titled Derricks and Liberty West to East (both 2002), were affixed to the wall with aluminum studs, the building materials here a fitting and poetic addition to these depictions of segments of buildings still standing beside the WTC site. Both paintings share similar compositions; an enormous crane and a fragment of sky are shown where the towers used to be. In Liberty West to East, the buildings are depicted in a bright, rusty red, and the sky is sunny and clear. This is in contrast to Derricks, in which the sky has an overcast grayish tone, and dust rises from the ground below. The paintings seem like traditional studies of a site at various times of day. Yet in each case, the solemn and austere way in which the image is cropped and, of course, the subject matter, make these two works meditations more than studies. The shape of the painting supports in Derricks and Liberty West to East--two vertical rectangles, 48 by 17 inches each, hung side by side--replicates the proportions of the WTC towers, as though standing in for the absent buildings.

One of the strongest works in the show, Terrible Beauty (2002), shows the skeletal remains of one of the towers amid the rubble. Petracca has again chosen to present this painting on a building-shaped panel, this time propped on a shelf of architectural molding. Where the rest of the tower should be, there is a bright blue sky, a few branches and, again, a crane clearing the site.

Petracca, by choosing to reproduce images that have become all too familiar, invites us to meditate on them. These paintings reflect the hope, perhaps naive, that the image of the fallen towers can be invested with new meaning, one that is not sensationalistic, but contemplative and humane.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group