Nina Bovasso,
David Dupuis, Andrew Masullo
Derek Eller
526-30 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
212 206 6411
January 5 - February
2, 2002
By
Chris Moylan
A fat graphite figure
slops out of a multi-colored disc in David Dupuis's "Love Connection"
at Derek Eller Gallery, licking the edge of the twin disc on the opposite
panel of the diptych; the color wheel has got its tongue. Or phallus,
which suggests that if color could talk, it would talk about sex. Language
often appears to be rising (or falling) out of the surfaces in this
remarkable group show, rising and receding, changing form, just eluding
one's grasp, as it were. Biomorphic shapes drift over colored-pencil
wave-patterns in two other compositions by Dupuis. Abstract shapes within
thought or dialogue balloons of cartoon illustration imply that something
is being expressed under the pleasant glow of amorphous suns hovering
nearby. The allusions to thought and talk tease us out of the merely
decorative without resolving into reference or abstraction. The general
effect is a trippy isolation, the odd creatures of another world viewed
through sealed glass. Even in those works in which the figures are somewhat
more accessible there is a sense of pre-verbal yearning, of significance
pushing up from the surface.
In Nina Bavasso's
"Suzanne's Burial Mound," [see cover] flower shapes and quilt
patterns in pinks and lavenders weave through the geometric lines. The
composition, breast-like, mound-like, pillow-like, forms into something
at once comforting and restless, improvising on feminine motifs while
allowing the momentum of repetitive pattern to inscribe the surface
with an intensity of gesture. Bavasso's elaboration of simple, freely
drawn shapes has been compared to doodling, but, as is the case with
Dupuis's work, the building up of irregular forms into an off-balance
mass suggests something more complicated and ambitious than that. Her
images get at a merging of biology and signifying system, of vital energy
and consciousness, as if the unwieldy cell structures she draws were
tottering into nostalgia or whimsy.
Andrew Masullo's
three-dimensional paintings introduce a brightly colored and palpable
thingness to all this play on signifying and not signifying. He builds
and shapes with paint, raising three-dimensional shapes off flat, painted
grids or monochrome surfaces. Again, there are biomorphic shapes, and
hints at codes and signs, as well as cheerful allusions to Pop, Minimalism
and Modernist abstraction. It is difficult to say what this adds up
to, or if adding up to a particular point is at issue. Masullo titles
his works according to their place in his oeuvre, and by now the four
digit stretch of each title has its own poignancy. In this near hermetic
persistence Massullo connects, paradoxically, with Dupuis and Bovasso.
That Derek Eller should bring together such particular artists, and
allow their works to speak among each other without an imposed rubric,
is a credit to his eye and to his critical acumen.
