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ARTnews December 1995

New York/National/International
REviews

"Arts & Letters"
June Kelly

A themed exhibition, this thought-provoking group ensemble curated by Cynthia Nadelman, a contributing editor at ARTnews, asked us to reflect on the role that letters and words play in visual art. Early modernist artists pointedly avoided anything "literary" in their works, but since Pop art, the written word has been a stock component in painting.

Three canvases in this show by Jan Sawka, a former Polish dissident, included mysterious script spelling out what seemed like an uncrackable code. Room #4 showcased an empty, turned-down bed in the foreground, with retreating plain above it filled with faces, words, and unidentifiable figures moving up toward a horizon for some absent dreamer.

Equally provocative was Lesley Dill's Poem Wedding Dress, an unframed cloth rectangle, painted black, to which was attached a long dress of crinkled newsprint- a newspaper in Arabic that included an ad in English for a travel tour to Pakistan. Dill cites Emily Dickinson as one of her sources, so this newsprint counterpart to Dickinson's trademark white dress was even more disturbing for being smeared with black paint and verbal fragments.

In La famille, Mr. Pauvre, Chéri Samba, an artist from Zaire, used figurative techniques from naive painting to show a village scribe writing letters for assembled neighbors––all of the messages are pleas for help and are delivered by ragged villagers to a man in a suit seated on a sofa in the distance. He doesn't seem interested, but the viewer couldn't fail to be fascinated by this, as well as by the works of Zarina and of Xu Bing- more of the exhibition's "letters to the world."

ALFRED CORN

[[Image]]
Lesley Dill, Poem Wedding Dress, 1995, photo serigraph, 56 3/4"x 44"x 9". June Kelly.