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[[left margin]] May 20 - June 20, 1988 [[/left margin]]g Page 2 Art/World News Ten museums, along Fifth Avenue from 104th to 82nd Street, will open to the public Tuesday evening, June 14th from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. in the 10th annual Museum Mile Festival. For information on the Festival, contact Arthur Lindo at (212) 860-6894 or Anne Scher at (212) 860-1860. We Have Moved KATHARINA RICH PERLOW to 560 Broadway (212) 941-1220 [[image - sculpture]] The Torso April 2-May 29 Richard McDermott Miller The Figure Sculptor of Soho FFS Gallery, 53 Mercer. New York 10013 (212)226-4850 New Paintings James Little Al Loving June 11th through July 1, 1988 June Kelly Gallery 591 Broadway, New York, New York 10012/212 226 1600 Dorothy Dehner Recent Monumental Sculpture Drawings & Gouaches "The Damnation Series" (circa 1943-47) April 22-May 28, 1988 Twining Gallery 568 Broadway, NY, NY 10012 (212)431-1830 Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11:00-6:00 Carrington Continued from Page 1 fying the mental principal has been mysteriously transformed into blue bird-like dogs which roost among cabbage-roses in an arid landscape. In other paintings, animals fight to escape human control, as in "Red Goose," in which a shrouded figure desperately clings to a fiery goose that sheds red feathers rather than golden eggs as it struggles to get away. In "Ash Wednesday" it is a mute blue chicken with a tipsy halo that proves uncontrollable. Carrington's reverence for the instinctual life, manifested in these animal spirits, is profound. To abuse instinct—to overindulge, for example, in food, drink or sex—is to abuse the gods and to destroy the delicate equilibrium between matter and spirit. Animals also witness the rituals, or passages, that mark the transitions from one liminal, or subliminal, space to another. "The Lovers" (1987), painted in rich tones of red and blue, confront each other in bed, under a brown coverlet that is like the earth itself, and under the signs of the sun and moon. This alchemical meeting of opposites is witnessed by an ecumenical group that includes hooded figures wearing Celtic crosses and peaceful animals, all sheltered from the desert night by the folds of a large tent. "Ikon" (1988) refers to a sacred space in which a procession of human and animal figures, perhaps including the artist herself, pauses on an arched bridge above an underwater mirror-world where humans and animals meet and exchange secret signs. San Francisco, 1988 (Excerpted from the catalog for Leonora Carrington's show of recent works at Brewster Galley, 41 West 57th Street, to June 4) Spender Continued from Page 1 [[Image]] Matthew Spender, "Volturae, 1987, 130 x 100 cm, oil on canvas, at the Berkeley Square Gallery, 23 A Bruton St., London to June 18. our date and place of birth, might have had other intentions. I first saw Matthew's work fifteen years ago. We were both young, and Matthew enjoyed describing himself as a part-time painter. In the morning he worked the land on his small farm in Chianti, and in the afternoon he shut himself in the studio, which was also a barn, in order to paint. In my apartment in Rome I have a work of that period, a moonless but moonlit night in which a tractor ploughs the hill around Avane, ploughs the night itself with one yellow lamp. One can sense the anxiety that lies just beneath the surface of the paint, the mastered innocence and the excitement of Matthew as a young man searching for his identity as a painter. I remember that in those years he struggled equally for the quality of his wine, as red and rough as blood spilled in the war of liberation from the father-figure. The soil just turned by the plough was red with it, as it was after the battle of Monteaperti, and the tractor of Dovcenko approaches in close-up, at once revolutionary and domestic. I do not know if that anxiety is yet placated, now that Matthew has won the war for his identity. The lightness of poetry no longer frightens him, now that he has become aware of bodies, that heap together on the large canvases like refugees fled to a church or temple. Or are not those bodies themselves the temple? Their legs in trousers as hard as marble, with thick doric fingers, women whose hair is suspended as if petrified in mid motion, a frieze for a tuscan Parthenon where every year, in a particular month, in the fields there is repeated the miracle of social realism that seemed denied the year before. The Refugees are there within the temple of the canvas, thinking of other things, The young men and women have minor gods to protects them; it is difficult to tell who are the gods and who are the mortals. Their lives are contained within their corporeal weight, which becomes again the actual weight of wood or terracotta, or canvas which has been rendered with the massive quality of fresco. The unbearable lightness of poetry has been exorcised forever. Sons of poets desire to visualise that which their fathers have imagined, but with the language of sculpture, of paint, of cinema. Roma 5-3-88 (Excerpted from the catalog for the exhibition of the paintings, drawings and sculptures of Matthew Spender at the Berkley Square Gallery at 23a Bruton Street, London W1, to June 18.) China Institute 125 East 65th Street is showripe group of rare jades similar to those recently excavated from Neolithic tomb sites in China in the last two decades. Tanning Continued from Page 1 its own secret forest, or cave, or under the sheets. And then it all comes back in a flash, and then it is gone. Dorothea Tanning's works have a soft shine. Is it because men might feel too impressed by the strenth and presence of the feminine power and weakness in the world of Dorothea Tanning's pictures that her paintings have not yet been given the place they should have in the story of painting in this century? Are women more intelligent than men, to is it just that they become more intelligent? The Nordic element coming from Dorothea Tanning's family heritage is strongly present in her paintings. The daily fight with oneself that Strindberg managed to express so beautifully and powerfully, the struggle with the troll within is a large part of what we see. If one would be interested in the genetics of nations and how ideas and behavior are inherited, it would be something to try to understand. How can so much of Strindberg or Almwuist be present in Dorothea Tanning's work? Even the drastic, fearful humor of the Icelandic sagas is sometimes there. Did that Swedish poet Carl Jones Love Almquist ever come to Galesburg, Illinois, Tanning's birthplace, during his wanderings in America in the last years of his life in the middle of the last century? Did he somehow leave a hidden message under some bush, maybe a few torn leaves dealing with the beautiful Sara—the heroine of the first feminist story, who tells her lover, a sergeant in the army, that she does not want to marry, but to continue her independent life, putting glass panes into windows- or with the androgynous Amorina, who kills her king in the opera house in the Ball Masque. Dorothea Tanning's technique is superb but, of course, she has painted her whole life. She walks especially in her later work, a tight-walk on the edge of the void. In large areas of the canvases there is nothing but color, but her passion and fury is never absent in the hot fluids and explosive clouds of her paint, the beauty that she is wrapping her mysterious beings in, like in an underwater bedroom. The magic of transforming material into spirit holds no secrets for her; she does it as relaxed as a sleepwalker. It is a world where anima rules—men, women, dogs and matter live there on the same conditions of erotically intensified spirituality. nThe space in Dorothea Taning's paintings is not related to the outside world but to the mind; it is a surrealistic space, and inner space, made up of the endlessness of the universe of feelings, of the surf of the brainwaves. From the top of the world, in her voluptuous clouds, Dorothea Tanning is sending her angels on their missions- and only she knows whether it is for fun or for damnation. (Excerpted from the catalog for Dorothea Tanning's exhibition at Kent Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, through June 18th.) Frederick J. Brown, a 43 year-old New York artist whose works are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has accepted an invitation from the Chinese government's Chinese Exhibition Agency to the the first Western artist to exhibit his works in the Great Hall of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Tian'An Men Square, Beijing from June 1 to 21. To be featured: 100 of Brown's expressionistic paintings and drawings created over the last 20 years. Rouan Continued from Page 1 Baroque is its own way, it was part of what was at stake. Sometimes it is necessary to be out of place in order to see certain things in theirs. I imagine that in speaking, from withing this Italian decor, in French, of the American minimalists, he entered as a foreigner, into a space where painting was not foreign. Thanks to this rupture—the gap between the place and what was spoken there—the translation began. For twenty years Rouan's project has been tied to the production and maintenance of a gap: that between the image and the painting. How can these be separated? How can the first be excluded without banishing the second? How can one eradicate the image without losing the painting? Braiding was at first a strategy of resistance. It disrupted the iconophilia of narrative. The randomness of its deployment made it difficult for a story, in developing, to obliterate the painting itself. In this sense, braiding is first of all a negative gesture: iconoclastic, minimalist. But the minimalists continue to make the image coincide with the painting; to reject both together is to persist in a way of confusing them. From this point forward, many strands begin to interlace. One is not always up to making the distinction between the gesture that uncovers and that which covers over the ground or its absence. On top of his braidings Rouan set himself to painting braidings. Strange Minotaur in which the real branding united itself with it double, welding the images to its ground. But soon, itself caught in the web of what it repeats, the image covers over the model. At that point the braiding is hidden, but by its twin. It is impossible to see the difference between it and what hides it. How can we tell the metaphor from its ground? Moreover, how can we know if behind its image there is or is not a real braid? If, behind its double, there is a simple braiding hidden? But no braid is simple. The embrace is always in the braid. Between two. Or between itself. Over. Under. Look, it says. I am double. (Excerpted from the catalog for Francois Rouan's show at Pierre Matisse Gallery, 41 East 57th Street to June 4) Torres Continued from Page 1 there defined his reality. Southern Hemisphere of 1978, for example, is a provocative reference to Montevideo's flat expanse of watery horizon and (in the top lefthand corner) unique hilly outpost known as El Cerro, island site of a huge factory, which—along with big ships waiting high on the water to enter its harbor—is emblematic of the city. Below, beached, amorphous, aquatic forms simulate the organic detritus that regularly washed up on Montevideo's shores. The peculiar ambiance of this remote, far southern point on the American continent its vast and desolate stretches of sea, sand and sky, the eerie quality of its light increasingly pervades Torres' landscapes from this time on. (Excerpted from the catalog for the exhibition of Torres' paintings at the Americas Society, 684 Park Ave., April 19 to July 31) Frescoes by the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, the only ones on public view in New York City will be restored through a grant of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, New School for Social Research.
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