KAREN WILKIN
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like any other. Olitski has clearly been a profound influence, but what
was equally clear from Griefen's exhibit at Salander-O'Reilly is how in–
adequate the assumption of sameness really is.
The best of Griefen's layered, brushy canvases seem to happen as you
look, his gigantic sweeps of paint momentarily coalescing into unstable
configurations. His color sense is idiosyncratic, with the most successful
pictures often appearing to be colorl ess, with a murky sheen, almost like
fur , not because of their surfaces, which are rather dry, but because of
subtle chromatic and tonal shifts. The show was evidently chosen to em–
phasize the difference between pictures, a good thing, since it forced
viewers to concentrate on individual works and, it is hoped, discover
their personalities . They should have . This was Griefen's best show to
date.
Bannard's show, a survey of his work of the past five years, installed
in two parts at the Montclair Art Museum, was also chosen to emphasize
the individuality of his pictures. As in Griefen's show, the strategy helped
to make clear both the artist's connection to a tradition of modernist
painting and his contribution to that tradition. Since 1987, Bannard has
been preoccupied by variations on a structure created by scraping layers
of transparent color over more opaque color. This may sound pre–
dictable, but it isn't. Bannard's images range from the lyrical to the edgy;
they can be diaphanous as an Impressionist landscape or crisp as a Cubist
still life - which their restricted palette and sharp-edged planes often
evoke. Skips and stutters of Bannard's spreading tool make layers of
color interchangeable, as does the intensity of color itself, which creates
an unexpected spatial pulse at odds with the apparent economy of means.
The installation stressed Bannard's gifts as a colorist, making much of the
unnameable metallic hues of his recent paintings, some with the elusive
glow of old sepia ink, others cool and transparent, and still others heated
and audacious. Yes, both Bannard and Griefen adhere to a time-honored
(and in the view of some of my colleagues, obsolete) notion of what a
painting can be. They're proud to do so, and they help to keep the idea
alive and healthy.
Medrie MacPhee, a new young painter with a different relationship
to the past, made an impressive New York solo debut at Philippe
Daverio Gallery in April. (Previously she had been seen here in a two–
person show at 49th Parallel.) MacPhee paints industrial "landscapes,"
images of those incredibly complex structures you see from the train or
the highway, passing through a manufacturing town or a port - those
wonderful, skeletal assemblies of girders and tanks and struts whose
function you can never quite determine. She is able to turn these
enigmatic constructions into haunting "creatures" with distinct
personalities (without, I hasten to add, any suggestion of animated
