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PARTISAN REVIEW
stronger and less predictable image. His most successful pictures, in the past,
have often exploited this kind of contradiction; a series of florid sunsets, over
the less lovely parts of New Jersey, painted a few years ago, tested an al–
most nineteenth-century notion of nature as sublime and transcendent against
the realities of the waterfront fringes of New York in the late twentieth cen–
tury. They were first-rate, and the best of the paintings of tall groves deal
with a similar tension between an inherited, idealized conception of nature and
the facts of observed actuality, freely and loosely rendered, with broad pas–
sages of scumbled color suggesting, rather than depicting, telling details.
April Gornik's canvases, seen at Edward Thorp Gallery in April and
May, depended upon related ideas, but they were more wholeheartedly
committed to the Sublime. She paints operatic meteorological effects, apoca–
lyptic skies and last trumpet effects oflight. The most convincing pictures,
however, seem the most evidently invented and, at the same time, the most
deadpan.
An
image of a drowned formal landscape, a kind of dream park,
with symmetrical, if improbable allees, is one of Gornik's most compelling.
The insistent rows of trees and their repeated reflections in the surface of the
water carry us into and across the picture and, coincidentally, solve any
problems of composition and distribution of color. Other less stylized images
with more overt drama risk flying apart. Gornik is a tonal painter rather than
a colorist, and she's best when she stays nearly monochromatic, as in the
brooding, dark
Brunhildes Wahl,
with its looming funnel of cloud and its am–
biguous, silhouetted "haystacks." (It's like a Monet of the end ofthe world.)
Gornik is obviously willing to risk calendar-art sentimentality, in order to try
for the kind of all-stops-out cosmic drama she wishes to evoke, but her recent
pictures suggest that she is best when she exercises more restraint, in terms
of subject and of structure.
Archie Rand's April exhibition at Scott Hanson Gallery was in quite a
different vein than Resika's, Berlind 's, or Gornik's and in quite a different
vein, too, than his own work of the past few years. Rand has been exploring
visual languages, from the most commonplace to the most rarefied, loading
his pictures with disparate images ranging from cartoon figures to ravishing
expanses of "pure" painting. Sometimes it seemed as though he were seeing
just how outrageous the combinations could be before the picture fell apart,
while at others, he appeared to be stretching the limits of visual
associativeness. He always seemed willing to risk disaster - or perhaps he
invited it. I've often found myself interested in what Rand was up to,
stimulated and challenged by it, even when I didn't like it.
Rand's recent works are sparer and cleaner than they have been for
some time, with color limited to black and white and imagery stripped down
to a minimum. Many of the new works are extremely large, almost to the
