KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
T
HE MOST DISCUSSED SHOWS
of the past season were-for very
different reasons-
Vermeer and the Delft School
and
Jacqueline
Kennedy: The White House Years.
These widely divergent block–
busters, one a paean to illuminating scholarship, the other a celebration
of vicariousness and/or nostalgia, got most of the press and, to judge
from the crowds at the Metropolitan Museum, most of the attendance,
but there were plenty of other notable exhibitions in New York during
the past few months, among them an impressive debut, a constellation
of offerings by old pros and mid-career artists, and a couple of surprises.
Let's start with the surprises.
At Cecilia de Torres Gallery, the Argentine-born, New York-based
Eduardo Costa presented an elegant installation of recent "volumetric
paintings." Chunky spheres and discs, plump triangles and rectangles,
sometimes sliced or altered, appeared to thrust through the walls of the
gallery or to hover against them. At first, these simple geometric solids
seemed straightforward enough, but they became more elusive over time.
Despite their economy, they seemed to question the premises of mini–
malism, and despite their bulk, they were curiously un-sculptural. Costa
seems to subscribe to a modernist notion of painting as a flat surface cov–
ered with some hue; he substitutes real density and real spatial presence
for the illusionism of traditional painting, so that flatness swells into
mass, yet mass remains a visual, rather than tactile attr ibute. It's as
though the "volumetric" works began life as brushy monochrome paint–
ings, but wrenched themselves out of two dimensions into three in order
to become chunks of dull primary colors or pristine black and white.
I had associated Costa with stylish, often ephemera l conceptual pro–
jects-the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum from the literally and
figuratively substantia l, thoughtful structures at Torres. Yet according
to a handsome, informative catalogue, Costa has made "volumetric"
works since the mid-'90S, after he saw a lump of dried pigment in a can
and decided that it was "a new kind of painting." (The ear li er "volu–
metric" pieces included rather cartoonlike figurative constructions of
lemons or flowers.) Whether Costa's recent "volumetric paintings"
