Elliott Green at Postmasters - Brief Article

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by David Ebony

Marcel Duchamp's often reiterated advice to artists, "Have fun or you'll bore us," seems to have been taken to heart by New York painter Elliott Green, who approaches dead-serious issues of abstraction and figuration as if they were lighthearted jokes. In the 11 recent, medium-sized acrylic and oil paintings in this show, he grafts impossibly goofy cartoon figures and animals onto austere arrangements of hard-edge geometric forms, as if this were a logical and effortless exercise. The exhibition, titled "New Full Color Paintings and Sketch Movies," was a stunningly successful departure from his previous solo show, which featured large, sleek and spare, nearly monochromatic compositions. Here, he reintroduces wacky, quasi-surrealist characters, like those in his first New York exhibitions, to activate the colorful geometry in a tumbling, morphological mix. Installed at the gallery entrance, a video monitor showing Green's digitally animated film, Sketch Movies, was key to the show. On the screen, continuously changing, fluid black lines demonstrated the evolution and devolution of Green's figures, from Hans Hartung-like graphite slashes to full-blown cartoon characters that are a cross between R. Crumb and Dr. Seuss.

Green manages to convey a similar sense of morphing figures and spastic movements in the paintings. Dropped by Angels, for instance, a 40-by-30-inch canvas composed of interlocking curving shapes, flat planes of white, black and blue, hints at a falling man. Set against a cobalt field in this work, several fat hands rendered in the crisp, serpentine black lines of a Popeye cartoon dominate the center portion of the canvas. The bottom half features elliptical black shapes and white lines that suggest a crumpled body. On the lower right are a pair of twisted legs and comically exaggerated shoes, one of which seems to press against the cheek of a contorted face on the lower left. His wildly distorted but delicately modeled features include slicked back hair, a curled nose and bulging eyes that recall those of character actor Peter Lorre.

Movie themes and pop culture references appear elsewhere. In Bob Dylan Returning Shirley Temple to Liza Minelli, Green produces a hilarious rendering of three American pop icons. An absurdist drama played out against an almost constructivist background of red, white and blue rectangles, the composition features exaggerated faces and limbs drawn with sweeping graphite lines. The elongated arm of the figure on the right, presumably Dylan, embraces the little curly top, as if he's about to hand her over to a personage with a turned-up nose, an audacious caricature of Liza. In this work, and all the others on view, Green, with tongue-in-cheek wit, nonchalantly offers what appears to be a radical new synthesis of Pop art idioms, expressionism and hard-edge abstraction.