648
PARTISAN REVIEW
Dan Christensen showed works tracing the graduaJ transformation of
his glowing, disembodied "disc" paintings into jazzy accumulations of
rapid scribbles, at once abrasive and beautiful. The show was dominated by
confrontational, hard-to-ignore images in which the hovering, centralized
"disc" mutated, changed shape and proportions, and entered into complex
conversation wi th a surrouncling force-field of brushy, layered color. It was
like watching the artist's hand assert itself more and more visibly in an
inchoate mass of color, pulling it into momentary resolution-momentary
because Christensen's offbeat color sense, which runs to metallic pinks,
glittering blues, and acid yellow-greens played against, say, chalky black–
greens and ochres, gives his recent paintings a pulse that implies imminent
change. The staccato black and white calligraphy of his most recent, most
animated picture-the one with the scribbles-suggested that Christensen
is increasingly letting his hand show, without sacrificing any of the airiness
or the arresting frontality of his earlier work. The best of his pictures are
like insistent musical notes, endlessly prolonged.
Kikuo Saito showed a rigorously selected group of "black pictures,"
both on canvas and on paper. The canvases rang changes on meticu"lously
drawn alphabets stacked against delicate, over-scaled grids, eroding into
fluent bleeds and strokes of color or subsiding into an enveloping wash of
paint-or were the detached letters solidifying out of the dark, liquid pig–
ment? These enigmatic, poetic pictures read as walls, backdrops, or
signboards, implacably frontal, but constantly threatened with dissolution
into unintelligible clusters of strokes. Saito's severe works on paper bene–
fi tted by being seen as a series, since proximi ty emphasized their
differences. The breadth of moods, spaces, and densities the works on paper
evoked-from insistent layers to transparent floods to carefully construct–
ed "rock faces"-was impressive.
At P.S. 1, the enign1atically titled 0044--the dialing code between
[reland and Bri tain-surveyed contemporary Irish artists working in
London. Whatever their origin or present location, however, most of them
seem to employ the same formal and conceptual strategies as their coun–
terparts elsewhere: overscaled photos, anonymous facture, random
accumulation, astonishing technical effects, ambiguous texts, and all the rest
of it. I can't say I recognized any unifying or clistinctive characteristics,
which is probably fine with the participants, many of whom expressed dis–
may at being labeled with a national identity when they were interviewed
for the exhibition's catalogue. Most of it was pretty forgettable-with a
couple of exceptions, the first a performance during the show's opening by
Andre Stitt, which was outstanding for ineptness and incoherence even by
the standards of a discipline not famous for refined stagecraft or rigorous
logic.
