642
PARTISAN REViEW
these images were set side by side, each
in
an oversized blue-painted bed,
as the boys were in the films, each nestled against an embroidered pillow,
the blanket pulled up cozily.
It
was both solemn and hilarious.
Srouji's lyrical, disturbing diptych, along with some of the other pic–
tures in
The French Connection I,
offered reassuring evidence that serious,
unironic, deeply-felt painting still has accomplished practitioners, but if
you had any doubts, further corroboration was provided by John Adams
Greifen's show of recent works at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries. Greifen's
gritty, gestural paintings have clear affinities with Olitski's, but the resem–
blance has more to do with shared assumptions about what a painting can
be than with a desire to emulate. Like Olitski, Griefen is convinced that a
picture need not refer overtly to anything but itself-specifically to the his–
tory of its making-but he is equally convinced that the maker's deepest
emotions and most deeply held beliefs will somehow remain legible in the
traces of that history. Which is not to say that Griefen is not knowledge–
able about art of the past. Far from it. I suspect, in fact, that he thinks far
more about Rembrandt and Titian than he does about Olitski.
Griefen's best pictures seem to happen while you watch, as though you
were confronted by a breaking wave or-more accurately-a lava flow of
dense pigment. Time seems momentarily suspended by his overscaled ges–
tures, so that the pictures seem at the same time disembodied and
sculptural. The most convincing paintings in the show seemed to me the
most straightforward, apparently the most direct, as though the painter had
effortlessly stroked his thick pigment into an expressive configuration
tensely related to the edges of the canvas. But they also seemed willful,
charged, insistent. I was sometimes troubled by the deadpan matteness of
Griefen's surfaces, which can verge on opacity and inertness, but the sheer
conviction of his pictures, the pervasive sense of his passionate love for
both the raw materials and the process of painting comes through, enliven–
ing even the dryest of surfaces. What was most impressive to me, in the
end, was the downright
Jeltness
of these paintings, their air of absolutely
everything's having been wholeheartedly meant. I may not have liked
everything in his show equally well, but it was plain that each picture was
the result of an individual quest for intensity and momentary resolution,
not the result of applying a formula or "strategy." It's depressing to think
that this needs noting, but these are frequently rare commodities in an era
when a great deal of art that is taken seriously comes with built-in dis–
claimers. Griefen's evident pursuit of that much-questioned quality,
excellence, with sincerity and without words, is radical these days.
A poignant reminder of a time-not that long ago-when such aspi–
rations were not extraordinary was the exhibition at Tibor de Nagy
Gallery of selections from the Roland
F.
Pease Collection, most of them
