Michael Hurson at Paula Cooper - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Reagan Upshaw

The Balanchine Drawing established the premise for Michael Hurson's recent exhibition of drawings. Consisting simply of text beautifully hand-printed in pencil, ink and conte crayon, the drawing in part quotes the late choreographer saying, "Classicism is enduring because it is impersonal" and T.S. Eliot urging that the artist "surrender himself to 'his impersonality' as part of a greater tradition."

The link with the tradition of art history is evident in the two principal series of drawings in the show, "Study for Adam and Eve" and "Guernica." The first is based on Masaccio's famous Expulsion from the Garden. Though schematic, the figures are instantly recognizable. Hurson has always been able to capture defining elements in a simplified format; in his portraits of a dozen years ago, one could invariably recognize the sitters, even though their features had been systematized to a sort of cartoonish Cubism. in the "Study for Adam and Eve" drawings, he builds up his figures with a vigorous shorthand and creates a luscious surface by the play of the greasy conte crayon and the ink which cannot penetrate it. A background of crosshatching and sgraffito produces a nice buzz and sets the figures in a spotlit, dramatic situation.

Using Picasso's Guernica--surely one of our century's best-known images--as a basis for a contemporary work of art is typical of Hurson's self-assured whimsy, and he pulls it off. Picasso's gigantic painting is reduced to an image barely 2 feet wide, and his abstraction is taken a step further: the arm and hand of the screaming figure at the right, for example, almost become a leafy tree. Picasso's stark black, gray and white color scheme, appropriate for tragedy, is redone in yellow, pink, orange and other colors. The terrifying event that inspired Picasso is here transmuted to mere decoration, as if Hurson were saying that he can work with anything. Yet there is no sense of satire or cynicism; too straight to be parody and too loony to be homage, the drawings charm as they perturb.

Other drawings in the show have Hurson's trademark deadpan humor. The Drinking Fountain presents a cartoonish yet enigmatic portrait of an object of everyday use, rather like the scissors, sofas and roller-skating pens that have romped through his earlier work. And an untitled drawing of a cat with a golf club teeing off is not too strange a subject for an artist who used to be an assistant to Burr Tillstrom, the creator of the puppet show "Kukla, Fran and Ollie."

Hurson arrived at his technical virtuosity very early in his career and has continued to work at a high level in a narrow range of artistic concerns. He amuses and delights, and he can make the mediums do what he wants. It's enough.