Matthew Antezzo at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Melanie Marino

In his recent solo exhibition, Matthew Antezzo pillaged documents of Conceptual and Post-Minimal art. In six paintings and one drawing, Antezzo faithfully, if sketchily, reproduces photographs culled from art magazines of the late '60s and early '70s, the era of the "dematerialization of the art object." These images of paintings, installation works, performances and videos are rendered in large grisaille panels; in each case, a lower white panel is inscribed with an identifying caption.

Artforum, Sept. 1974, p. 80 depicts an installation view of three Marcia Hafif monochrome paintings, in which the canvases are distinguished from one another by size and tonality. Antezzo carefully preserves the surrounding details, such as two plainly exposed electrical sockets and a wire running the length of the wall beneath the paintings. Nevertheless, with his flat and undifferentiated handling of paint, he omits the refinements of brushwork which, within Hafif's paintings, signal the passage of time; these subtleties can be appreciated only through actual experience. The loss that occurs with our temporal distance from the original moment, Antezzo suggests, is one that even photographic reproduction cannot recover.

Artforum, Dec. 1974, p. 84 is based on an installation shot of Michael Asher's Situational Work. in that piece, Asher stripped the interior space of a Los Angeles gallery, removing a light track and the wall that separated the exhibition space from the office. The Artforum photograph reveals an empty exhibition space and the office area. Canvases are stacked against the back walls; shelves are filled with magazines and archival binders; a man and woman sit by a desk, engaged in conversation. In Antezzo's rendition of this scene, the details are hazy, and the features of the man and the woman are barely delineated. Antezzo's painting ironically resituates Asher's "situational esthetics." Where Asher's architectural manipulations laid bare the everyday activities of an art dealer, encouraging the public to examine how art becomes a commodity, Antezzo uses the Artforum photograph to imbue his painting with a readymade aura of institutional critique.

In Artforum, April 1969, p. 54, the subject is Rafael Ferrer's Ice Piece #3, an assemblage of ice blocks installed on a grassy embankment. As in the other pieces in this exhibition, Antezzo's grisaille painting produces a decided effect of nostalgia. The sense of homage, however, is ambivalent. The original caption consists of a quote from Robert Morris: "The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static iconobject no longer has much relevance." Antezzo's painting restores Ferrer's investigation of process to the status of just such a static icon.

These appropriations show Antezzo's affinity with certain Conceptual inquiries. Yet his paraphrases also seem calculated to blunt the theoretical edge of the depicted works, whose subversive nature was located in their ephemerality and their resistance to recuperation by art institutions. By embalming the documentary traces of these works in the medium of painting, Antezzo does not so much extend their critiques as reduce them to a set of fixed iconographic subjects.