Graham Parks
Feigen Contemporary
535 W. 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
November 29, 2001 - January 12, 2002
By David
Cohen
Graham Parks Living Quarters 2001, 16
x 16 inches, courtesy Feigen Contemporary, New York
Graham Parks'
debut solo exhibition, at Feigen Contemporary, announces the
arrival of a singular talent. Precisionist and poised, his urban
landscapes capture the inadvertent funkiness of functionalism.
He has found, in a pared-down language that smacks of the graphics
of architectural design magazines, a perfect means of depicting
the modernist built environment. Like its subject, Parks' form
is oxymoronically elegantly bland, poetically prosaic. For sure,
his exploitation of a hard-edged aesthetic reminiscent of graphics,
cartoons, and commercial illustration is a mainstay of artworld
strategy, but these works manage to balance knowing aloofness
and emotional investment. He revels in craftsy offsetting of
rough and smooth surfaces and of matt and relief, allowing color
schemes to veer from exquisite proximities to acid contrasts
to solarizing white-outs. His discoveries of readymade abstractions
in, say, the façade of a housing project belongs, of
course, to a venerable tradition, more particularly of photography
than painting, and the pleasure he takes in the decorative compression
of space is very Japanese-cum-Viennese, but where Parks seems
onto something genuinely original is in the pleasing tension
his work sets up between pristine execution and an aesthetics
of chance. The disposition of stencilled elements creates jazzy
intervals that keep perspective jumping around. In his hands,
functional illustration deftly gives way to accidental suprematism.
Graham Parks Messe 2001, 12 x 12 inches,
courtesy Feigen Contemporary, New York
In an inspired
coupling, Feigen have Parks showing alongside the German Frank
Breuer's photographs of coporate logos galvanizing dull landscapes.
Gas stations and factories are at once neutrally documented
and nonchalently aestheticized in the style of his teachers,
Hild and Bernd Becher. Breuer combines the creamy ethereal light
of Elger Esser and the alertness to life imitating art of Andras
Gursky, both of whom must be contemporaries, but he has a quirky
individuality that is welcome.
Frank
Breuer Untitled x 6 (1995-7, c-prints, 8 1/4 X 18 1/3
each and 18 1/2 x 59 1/2 inches overall, edition of 15)
