270
PARTISAN REVIEW
and unexpected.
Aurora
was the star of the show, a brushy sweep of
metallic grey over flesh tone, with a driving energy along its
eighteen-foot length that belied the delicacy of its drawing and the
lacy lingerie connotations of the color. Bannard's overscaled "stroke"
skips and misses, creating loose units that read as floating planes . It's
a 1980s version of Cubism, an explosion of planes made not by tight
rendering, but by excavation and by the varying pressure of a single
stroke. In Bannard's small pictures, the implied geometry of the
large paintings is more explicit. Their blocky compositions seem
tightly contained by their small formats, as though the pressures that
burst forth in
Aurora
were building at small scale.
I doubt very much that Bannard is deliberately reexamining
Cubist ideas. (He is surely not appropriating Cubist motifs .) But he
is clearly rethinking preconceptions of flatness and space, concen–
trating on that region between the fact of paint and the mystery of il–
lusion . Bannard's show was strong and satisfying, but it also made
me curious about what will come next.
Darryl Hughto's survey exhibition at Salander-O'Reilly Gal–
leries not only revealed where he is going, but indicated where he
has been, at least since 1975. Like Bannard and Olitski, Hughto is
absorbed by the material characteristics of his medium. He is a
virtuoso who fully exploits the transparencies , opacities, thickness,
matteness and shininess of modern day acrylic; even his peculiar,
edgy color is possible principally because of what acrylic paint can
do.
In the 1970s, Hughto explored neutral, deductive formats, in–
serting ovals and diamonds within the rectangle of his canvas to set
up complex relationships of edges, zones of color and paint surfaces.
While the selection at Salander-O'Reilly was limited, it was none–
theless possible to chart how Hughto's probing of the interplay of in–
terior and exterior led him to reconsider the shape of the canvas
itself. In his more recent work, what happens inside the picture
seems to determine the shape of the whole, yet important as shape
can be , color is perhaps the most critical factor in many pictures .
Forever Amber,
1978, was one of the best in the show, because of its
cranky, offset diamonds, its unpredictable edges and particularly
because of its deceptively simple palette of "off" red and green set
against a warm, honey-colored ground , like a Tuscan wall.
About four years ago , Hughto, without abandoning abstract
painting, began working from the figure . It forced him to rethink
drawing and especially color, since hue and tone now had to define
I
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