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Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

The paintings are being hyped as a "site-specific" response to Venice and are named for Casanova, the city's 18th-century memoirist and amorous adventurer. But these clinical pantomimes of erotic submission are more likely to bring to mind The Story of O. There is plenty of conventional sexual suggestiveness in the depicted encounters and the occasional appearance of a phallic dagger. But the power of the work lies in the evidence of the calculation that went into their creation -- the just-so length of a hem, the placement of a slit in a dress, the bend of a ring finger, the pentimento that reveals an adjusted contour. These paintings come on as a confession of voyeurism and a surrender to obsession, but Sarmento, self-possessed, unaroused, is pulling all the strings.

Sarmento's repeated depiction of faceless women in situations of passivity and victimization seems to have prompted not one feminist cry of "foul" from the crowds at the Biennale preview. All the denunciations about the exploitation of women's bodies in art seem to have been reserved for Robert Colescott. Yes, the comically sexualized image of a voluptuous woman is a recurring component in his bawdy satires of all that is predatory, racist and hypocritical in Western society. Does he run the risk of appearing guilty of misogyny even as he skewers it? Well, Colescott claims the license of the satirist to offend everybody. At 71, he does not feel bound by the circumspect codes of '90s consciousness.

Given the length of Colescott's career and his sheer orneriness as a political artist, it was disheartening to hear the African-American painter routinely dismissed in Venice as a "politically correct" choice for America. One British critic faulted the work for not being "universal, "while a New York editor opined that the artist was too provincial for fast-track international exposure. The 19 paintings on view, all from the last decade, say otherwise. The works are big, confident and merciless. Colescott speaks the language of his generation, infusing the color and raunch of Bay Area funk and the flagrant bad taste of '60s underground comics into some very knowing travesties. In one painting he exposes the lascivious racism of the French admirer who finds an African woman so very "exotique." Race-based criteria of beauty are the issue when black putti hold up a mirror and present a white reflection to a black nude in a send-up of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus. Colescott reclaims the African mask from Picasso by using Cubism's double profile to signify divided racial identity.

If there is a shortcoming it is not that the work fails to be universal but that the viewer comes to crave something more direct or intimate. The volume is always cranked up for public address. The catalogue informs us that Colescott can't remember a time when he wasn't drawing. Either Colescott or the curator, Miriam Roberts, should have trusted that the integrity of the artist's message would not have been breached had some drawings -- a sketch for a painting, the portrait of a friend -- been admitted into the exhibition as evidence of the painter's process or as the trace of a moment's satisfaction.