 At White Columns this month, Douglas Melini presents a room-filling colossus of a painting titled, well, Colossus. Melini considers it a single painting but it's comprised of separate panels, intended to be arranged in different configurations and adapted to the space in which they're hung. The White Columns installation features ten of a total of thirteen panels. Each panel is comprised of many rectangular "patches," or groups of stripes, each superficially resembling a miniature Kenneth Noland or Gene Davis painting (the reference isn't that overt; just to get you in ballpark). The stripes are carefully applied using masking tape and acrylic paint. Where those earlier painters used fewer (but larger) stripes to bowl over the viewer, Melini creates a kind of hyper-optic, wraparound, LCD Age spectacle with his arrays of tightly-spaced bands. On the epistemological front, the crisscrossing patches act as frames for other patches in a constantly shifting play of context. (One gets this intuitively and not from any jargon-laden handout, by the way; could it be we're finally outgrowing the '80s?) A more dramatic photo of the installation, by Walter Robinson, is here.
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A more dramatic photo of the installation, by Walter Robinson, is here.
- tom moody 7-18-2003 12:17 am