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Rosenquist Art New Dec 1975

activity, it is difficult to suppress this feeling with Burchfield. Why can his most naive techniques render nature so palpable to us? These are tantalizing puzzles, and they are at the heart of the creativity of one of America's most interesting artists.

David Bruzga (Ingber): The large, bold, hard-edged forms cut like knives across the lively, reflective planes of Bruzga's paintings. The acrylic surfaces have been polished to a shiny, enamel-hard finish and belie the overwhelming scale of Big Red, the major work in the show. The finish serves also to tie this enormous painting to the nearby miniature series, Woman. Bruzga's iconography is simply: "woman," a theme as old as magic. His intent is to provide metaphors, formal equivalents for his theme and for his response to it. Colors are determined by shapes: a given shape just "is" a certain color. Both are unnuanced, yet extremely complex. Egyptian Woman, not a large drawing, is one in which Bruzga's creative process is most clearly traceable. All forms and patterns are mutually generative; an organic force courses through the lines, empowering their permutations and ultimately unifying the entire show. 
–Margaret Betz

James Rosenquist (Castelli, uptown): In a series of large, horizontal drawings (roughly three by six feet), Rosenquist has made some awkward, startling images. These works are symbol-laden in a different way than before-now each object stands almost alone, distinct form the others, much as in pictographs. They are no longer surrounded by the swift-moving, all-over paint quality we often associate with Rosenquist's work, but are isolated images in a new kind of space. The color is harsh and intense and all the drawings are more personal, exuberant and naive than work I've seen before. A pastiche of materials is used; spray paint, charcoal, pencil, collage and cloth. Screen, rope and beads have been drenched in paint and then pressed onto the paper surface, there is occasionally a minimal amount of stenciling, and rainbows of pigment have been pushed along the surface of some pictures with a squeegee. Rosenquist identifies certain symbols with penciled words which accompany such forms as a "violet turn," a pail or tent shape. One strong work, Above the Equator-Below the Equator, is composed of two global bodies separated by a rather primitive looking house of cardboard and paint. All three objects float in front of a bright sky-blue ground. The exhibition looks tentative, but there are qualities of rawness and spirit and a powerful sense of scale that relate these drawings to earlier ones as the artist charts new territory.

Marsden Hartley (Babcock): This small but revealing retrospective spanned years between 1908 and 1943. Especially in the earlier works, many of which were painted abroad, Hartley shows his debt to the influence of Cubism and Expressionism. The European strain prevails in the paintings done in the last years of his life. Also evident is a kind of restless visual search for appropriate vehicles to express place, feeling, weather or time.

In some of the landscapes the raw gashes of paint have a heavy-handed awkwardness; in a portrait of Abe Lincoln, Young Worshipper of the Truth, the head is painted severely, head-on, with a tinge of the rawness found in Picasso's great breakthrough portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906). However, his most remarkable work least manifests the influences of other forms of art and shows instead the wonderful freshness of color and innocent interpretation of form for which Hartley is ultimately best known. One landscape of New Mexico, rendered in pastel and executed in 1918, is as lucid and free in style as the work of any contemporary realists. A lovely painting, Flowers by the Sea, 1942, collects a cloud and red blossoms in its composition in such a way as to tumble the viewers' eye back over it again and again in order to grasp its audacity. But best of all and most "American" is Storm Down Pine Point, Old Orchard Maine, 1943. In it, Hartley achieves a marvelous harmony; large angry waves come reaching in toward shore, distinct storm clouds hover in companionship overhead. Rooftops pierce upward, huddled together against the onslaught of rain and wind. There is an incredible amount of movement and mystery in this painting. It is hard to understand exactly how the picture was made, how the murky color of storm could be so real - it is a painting out of time, the best kind.
-Barbara Zucker

Paul Burlin, Angelo Ippolito (Borgenicht): Subtitled "Abstract Expressionists Revisited" (one of a series?), the exhibition featured painting from the later 1950s and early '60s by Ippolito and from the last two decades of the late Paul Burlin's career. While Burlin, the older artist, maintained his abstract expressionist style throughout, Ippolito has since moved into figurative realms. The work on view seemed to foretell this: while both painted vigorously and expressively, only Burlin managed to establish a distinct pictorial personality, in which the formal and coloristic energies focus centripetally into relatively careful formations suggesting still lifes. While Burlin's "handwriting" was very much his own (suggesting only Guston, and him only obliquely), Ippolito's explosive landscape-like paintings are very much in the second generation mode derived from de Kooning and Kline. They established the early Ippolito as a fine painter, but only his later work has defined his true identity.

Pinchas Cohen Gan (Rina): Cohen Gan's subtle and wonderful drawings bring Richard Tuttle to an American's mind: like Tuttle, there is a concern on Cohen Gan's part for the erratic and poetic on both conceptual and perceptual levels. Just as Cohen Gan's involvement in process is more overt than Tuttle's however, his pieces are more closely related to extra-pictorial projects. The one

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James Rosenquist, Below the Equator, 1975, Castelli.

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