KAREN WILKIN
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point of bombast, but most of the time Rand, who has done a number of
commissioned murals, gets away with it. The best pictures were the most
about
painting,
in a way that could be described as the undoing of parody.
Rand takes the "cool," detached, mechanical look ofmodish, ironic abstraction
and translates it back into "real" hand-painted painting. Rand's colleagues of–
ten take the passionate gestures and sensuous surfaces of an earlier genera–
tion and turn them into something that looks like photomechanical reproduc–
tion -
pace,
Walter Benjamin - and Rand could be said to "reappropriate"
them. It's an odd idea, rescuing the threatened species of straight painting
from the bugbear of cynicism, if indeed, this is part of Rand's program. (He
sometimes seems influenced by Sigmar Polke, who occasionally appears to
celebrate the means of "straight painting" in spite of himself.) Is it enough?
When it works, yes.
Rand 's best pictures opposed all-over repeated patterns or illusionistic
textures, perhaps intended as homage to the Color Field painters and others
whom he admires, with more or less specific images. A vast expanse of black
and white pattern had equal associations of tribal mud cloth and the
checkered background of Matisse's wonderful
Pink Nude,
in the Cone
Collection. An atmosphere drift of "curtain" was the lushest passage in the
whole picture. The similarly constructed
Rest
juxtaposed a white-on-gray
checkerboard, a brushy "wing," and a huge, fragmenting laurel wreath. The
picture was chiefly about the play of varying densities and textures, about
crisp definitions and blurs. The images functioned as just another set of vari–
ables, evocative, but no more important than
how
they were painted.
(Several pictures that included hex-sign-like roundels suffered because they
lacked the unity of means and image of pictures like
Rest;
the images seemed
both gratuitous and expediently depicted.) Perhaps the most absorbing picture
in the show was a large, squarish horizontal canvas covered with overscaled
white-on-white woodgraining, partially veiled by feathery black overpainting.
It
was redolent of Cubist collage, Georges Braque's late, vast monochromatic
Studios
and, at the same time, Abstract Expressionist gesture, among other
things. It was Rand at his best, commenting on painting
by
painting, not by
depicting or illustrating. It made me intensely curious about what he will do
next.
The spring season ended with the temporary concurrence of exhibi–
tions by two non-American painters who now enjoy superstar status, Anselm
Kiefer and Francis Bacon. Anselm Kiefer's current group of monumental
works occupied both halves ofMarian Goodman Gallery through the middle
ofJune (and caused her to take down the previous exhibit almost a week
earlier than announced), while the Bacon retrospective, organized by the
Hirshhorn Museum and already seen elsewhere, will be at the Museum of
