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Frank Owen at Nancy Hoffman - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Richard Kalina
If you want to put a whole lot into play in a given work of art (and a growing number of artists these days do), painting, especially abstract painting, can do the job perfectly well. A reformulated, more referential abstraction--one freed from Greenbergian or Minimalist strictures--has turned out to be a particularly effective vehicle for the "more-is-more" artist. The veteran painter Frank Owen's exhibition last fall at Nancy Hoffman showed how a great deal of visual information could be accommodated in works that, while large, remain intensely articulated. It was this point-by-point focus that gave the paintings their particular tang and helped them resist the tendency that big, intricate paintings have of setting up an overall or field reading--that is, of sending the viewer into a lower-energy "scanning" mode, where individual passages are subsumed into an equalized whole.
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The paintings in the show were mostly squares or offsquares in the 7- to 8-foot range, and they were made, in keeping with Owen's longstanding practice, by laying down successive films of acrylic paint on a sheet of plastic, then pulling the entire finished work off and gluing it down to the canvas. The layer that was applied to the plastic first faces outward, and the successive applications line up behind it, obscured or emphasized, depending on the artist's wishes. The effect can be like the surface of a frozen pond or the embedded intricacies of blown glass, with perceived space and actual space intriguingly intermingled.
Owen lives in the Adirondack area of upstate New York, and a number of the paintings have landscape references. Between Seasons I and Between Seasons II are tangled thickets of browns, grays and sullied yellow ochers. They have a romantic, pleasantly downbeat air to them: they reminded me of crunching through fields on a cold and cloudy late autumn day. Corona/Carone, mostly black and white with flashes of buttery yellow, seemed more wintry. Leaves and twiglike forms push up against the surface, suspended as if under ice. If the landscapelike paintings felt moody, they were balanced emotionally by a group of works, the "Threader" series, inspired by the rococo exuberance of Venetian glass. Threaders: Madder and Marl is a 7-foot square teeming with large, beadlike transparent oval forms in a range of brilliant reds, blues and yellows. Some of the ovals are delicately marbled, some are composed of intricate linear whorls and scratchings, while others resemble jeweled patchwork. The elements in the painting join together in a delicious cacophony, but with each voice, as it were, clearly audible and defined. Owen's working method contributes to this clarity. It provides a means for isolating his motifs, of controlling the effects of transparency and layering. In the process, he has tapped into the simultaneity and suspension of time that have for so long been the province of painting.
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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
