Fernando Canovas at Krampf-Pei

"Painting has one foot in architecture and one foot in dream," wrote the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, a teacher of Fernando Canovas in Paris in the early 1980s. Canovas's recent paintings at Krampf-Pei, a new Chelsea gallery, updated the thought, exchanging delirium for dream. Throughout the late 1980s and the '90s, Argentinean-born Canovas developed a visual vocabulary of what he calls "primordial" architectural and sculptural forms--circles, cubes, cylinders, urns--presented over densely worked and scraped surfaces, usually of metal or canvas. The paintings often served as the basis for installations or functioned as sculpture. Their monumentality, scale and metaphysical ambition recalled Kiefer.

All that primordial allegorizing has vanished, replaced at Krampf-Pei by elaborately gridded, brightly colored acrylics, smaller in dimension than the earlier works and organized in neat groups or standing by themselves. Seeing replaces being as the objective of Canovas's art, Op replaces Surrealism, and the momentary replaces the eternal. Although Canovas used grids early on, their return creates such a shock on first view that it takes a while to register the knowledge of painting and opticality that informs them. Anything but mathematical and abstract, the grids have a subtle, painterly rhythm of thick and thin lines that make the surfaces appear to undulate, and the different planes interweave with a mesmerizing intricacy. Underneath the lines, but very close to the surfaces, are fields of pure gestural painting, near-explosions of different colors and patterns that lend each canvas a voice, or character. Flat has never seemed so deep. The more you look, the more you see: like a novel by Italo Calvino, the complications approach the edge of sanity.

Canovas extended certain lines from the paintings' grids onto the gallery walls, sometimes marking out empty tracts, occasionally connecting canvases. Where Peter Halley's extended grids can feel oppressively systematic, Canovas uses his to imply that painting and architecture spring directly from our sense of space and place and ultimately connect back to it. His paintings mediate between an optical space and an actual one that includes viewers. No longer a demiurge, dreamer, Prometheus, or prophet--all roles he has flirted with--Canovas has become the fabricator of optical occasions, the architect of opportunities for visual contemplation that, given enough time, can turn us back upon ourselves.

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