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Mike Cloud at Max Protetch, 511, West 22nd Street to October 2nd |
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This artist is just fresh out of Yale with a newly minted MFA and managed to score a show at Max Protetch. These facts represent an interesting contrast between a very young artist showing solo is this most blue chip of galleries. It rarely happens but plants hope in the hearts of all the other young Turks out there that it actually can happen. Cloud is one of those young Turks too as evidenced by the gusto and energetic paint he applies to his canvases. Oh yes, there are references to Jasper Johns and Alfred Jensen but what really gets your initial attention is the unabashedly crude paint, harsh colors and resulting contrasts. Cloud has managed to successfully create conceptual content via a ham-fisted approach to painting. Using chart and graph forms, which in and of themselves are already powerful visuals for establishing order, he then proceeds to take them on via an almost caustic approach to painting handling. The whole premise is half-baked and primitive, which is just why it works. Not for Cloud the detachment of Post Modernism or the intellectualism of conceptual art. Rather, Cloud seems to give the latter a poke in the eye or at least slaps it around with some raw emotion. This artist still has a lot to learn about painting but he has already discovered that taking chances is a large part of it. |
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Kwang-Young Chun at Kim Foster Gallery, 529 West 20th Street to October 16th |
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When first encountering this work you feel compelled to run your hand over the beautifully textured, delicate surfaces. Delicate is the operative word here because Chun, a Korean based artist, constructs these pieces from hundreds of tiny triangles wrapped in century old mulberry paper. Once you can tear yourself away from the magnificent surfaces what next emerges is the obsessive esthetic embedded in the work. This ties into the conceptual and minimalist content of Chun�s work. But once you actually step back from these pieces yet other |
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