Victor Pesce
Elizabeth Harris Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York NY 10003
212 263 9666
March 11 to April 10 , 2004
By
MAUREEN MULLARKEY
a version of this
article first appeared in The New York Sun on Thursday, April 8, 2004
Victor Pesce Pile
of Boxes 2002
oil on canvas, 12 x 18 inches
Courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery
COVER, April 16, 2004: Stack of Boxes 2002
oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Victor Pesce is
a sly abstractionist who rides the realist rail. His pared-down imagery
refers to real objects but just barely. His interest is elsewhere.
Bottles, cups, boxes
and pans avoid all suggestion of the culture of the table or human purpose.
Devoid of detail and context, Mr. Pesce's repertory of prosaic items
serves as proxy for conceptual categories. His subjects are archetypes
more than objects at hand. Imagery is pared to the bone without losing
its architectural solidity.
Space is ambiguous,
subordinated to color. Hints of shadow are partly teases, partly design
elements to avoid monotony in near-monotone color zones. Color is where
the excitement lies in these motifs. It has a bite that is as satisfying
as it is unnatural. Acidic blues, yellows and greens are modulated by
subtle transitions and relationships that act on the retina before we
become aware of them.
The appeal of Mr.
Pesce's painting lies in his sense of scale and proportion. Single objects
are endowed with monumentality, thanks to strong intuitions of the right
ratio between an object and the color field surrounding it. In this
show, he ventures onto new territory with amplified canvases that risk
surrendering scale to mere size.
His striking "Piles
of Boxes" (2003) or "A Matter of Time" (2003) succeed
because the format, while larger than usual, retains Mr. Pesce's characteristic
sense of measure. In the first, four boxes rise to a cunning pyramid
that is more stable than it first appears . In the second, everything
depends on the rightness of the intervals between three rectangles.
The pleasure of these paintings resides in the internal balance of simple
parts.
But when a modest
pictorial concept stretches to five feet in length, as in "Seams,
Corners, Shadows & Reflections" (2002), the effect slackens.
Upscaling increases the visual demand on surface variations, a requirement
at cross purposes with Mr. Pesce's uniform paint application. Not enough
happens to keep the eye moving across the canvas.
