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PARTrSAN REVIEW
May, paints lush, vigorous street scenes that place us among the dense
crowds of a New York sidewalk. Half-glimpsed figures slip past; in one of
the best of the series, a giant hanging clock blocks our view, making it
clear that we are observing from above. Radford's broad, painterly
shorthand is on the verge of dissolving into "pure" gesture, but his sure
eye for tonality usually makes even the most elusive swath of color take
its
place as shoulder or arm, forehead or nape.
There's something of the economy (and even the spirit) of David
Park's work in the best of Radford's pictures, but the palette is cooler,
more urban, and more tonal. When you discover that Radford is a
Londoner who moved to New York about ten years ago, it all makes
sense. A British sensibility comes to terms with the New York street. But
that's mere anecdote. What counts is that Radford is a serious, ambitious
painter
with a marvelous sense of the possibilities of his materials, a respect
for the history of his discipline, and an individual point of view.
Michael Mulhern's April show at Stephen Rosenberg Gallery, his
third there since 1988, was his riskiest and most thoughtful to date. He
has been consistent in thinking of painting as a synthesis of object and
surface, but his new works present this with more conviction. Earlier,
Mulhern built up surfaces that you could see into: nervous, unstable in–
terweavings of color that seemed to happen as you looked. The black and
white versions were especially tense and effective, oddly evoking both
Giacometti and Cubism with their monochrome hatching and stroking.
Mulhern most recently has added aluminum to his palette and abandoned
"woven" facture for pours and runs of fairly opaque paint, applied to
thick, small-scale canvases. It's as though he has made a conception of
Abstract Expressionism into both subject and object. ("Reification," I
think, is the word some of my colleagues would use.) See what I mean
about risk?
Mulhern's pictures, which once seemed the result of the combined
exercise of will and hand, now appear more dependent on intuition and
the character of materials. Scale is crucial, not only of the "mark" but of
the size and thickness of the canvas itself There's danger of the rivulets
and pools of paint becoming too complicated, just as there's danger that
the aluminum paint will refuse to read as a color and might simply reflect
light. In the best pictures, spontaneity and intention coexist happily. The
most successful manage to be meaty and lyrical at the same time. They are
pugnacious and elegant paintings that make us think about the nature of
abstraction itself
At first acquaintance, Dennis Ashbaugh's large, broadly handled pic–
tures, at Marisa del Re Gallery this spring, seem connected to the tradi–
tion of American abstraction. Blocks of soft-edged color floating against
