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Ken Johnson James Nares produces a suave spin on that modernist archetype, the big brush stroke. Each canvas by this New York painter bears a single, vivid stroke made all at once with a giant brush. Unlike a brush stroke by, say, Franz Kline, these are strangely disembodied: they are literally big brush strokes, but they also look like illusory images of big brush strokes. In dark primary colors on opalescent gray grounds, the satiny, luminous strokes twist sinuously in space or swirl agitatedly with jagged, feathery edges. Mr. Nares makes one per canvas and joins similar vertical panels into groups of three or four, creating choreographic rhythms.
This emblem of Dionysian freedom is produced by a painstaking process of trial and error. Using homemade, broom-handled brushes, Mr. Nares mops liquid paint onto canvas on the floor in a single, sweeping application. He considers the result and then, usually, wipes it away and tries again. It may require a hundred or more tries to arrive at the perfect effect of spontaneous fluidity. Related to the cartoon brush strokes of Roy Lichtenstein and the sleek, near-photographic strokes of David Reed, Mr. Nares's images can be read as Pop style parodies of an exhausted cliché. But the strokes also seem mysteriously animated, as though they were manifestations of some transcendental energy. They dance a fine line between irony and romance. |
