David Lefkowitz at Thomas Barry - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2001 by Robert Silberman

The history of modern art is punctuated by jokes: Duchamp's Fountain, Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, Mark Tansey's The Innocent Eye, which depicts a cow brought into an art museum to view a painting of cows. David Lefkowitz extends this lineage, having offered up sly, boyish wisecracks in a variety of forms: a proper academic painting of a slide projector, a series of baseball-card-size glimpses of sections of ballparks, a botanical illustration of a plant tendril intertwined with an electric cord, a still life that depicts a chemical molecule for artificial flavoring.

In his latest solo show, Lefkowitz explored nature under the rubric "Resourcer"--a neat conflation of "sorcerer" and "resources." Several paintings of cross sections of tree trunks appear at once realistic representations and a wacky treatment of the patterns of growth rings. Lefkowitz uses familiar materials in unfamiliar ways. Acoustical ceiling tiles, with a few touches of paint, are turned into topographic maps, the ragged indentations transformed into geological features. A section of chipboard becomes a painterly abstraction, with a faux bark edge as a frame. More ambitious in scale, two large works use flattened cardboard boxes instead of paper as the ground for colored pencil drawings of structures made of ... cardboard boxes. One shows a wall while the other depicts a frontier fort; both manage to suggest geometric modernism as well as childhood adventures with empty packing materials.

Lefkowitz is not a flashy artist, but he commands the technique necessary to get his jokes across and make clear the lively intelligence behind the humor. In a small back room, he offered up tiny paintings of tiny subjects, in elaborate gold frames. A beetle, "crumbs of uniform size," a bit of dust and a piece of Styrofoam appeared in this wry finale, perfectly calculated to leave viewers amused, astonished and looking forward to the next performance.