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Linda Yablonsky James Nares is a painter with the soul of a choreographer. He moves with his homemade brushes across his white enameled surfaces as if they were his own company of dancers. Together they execute elegant turns, sensuous dips and eye-catching elevations in paint. His current show, comprised of a number of these rather heraldic strokes of oil (all Untitled, 1995), synthesizes disparate aspects of his career to date (rock guitarist, super-8 film-maker, sculptor, painter) and underscores its essentially performative nature. In the theater of Nares, the principal character is the spontaneous brushstroke - an actor who loves to emote. I don't mean to say Nares' nearly ideographic figures are hammy, only that their swirls, ribbony undulations and double-back flips, have a great sense of play, not to mention beautiful "costumes" (that is, color). In some panels, Nares achieves a cobalt blue as enveloping as Yves Klein's. His other strokes are a golden yellow, blood-stain red and a transparent gray that borders somehow on lavender. One of the more striking aspects of this work is its photographic quality. Each piece seems to exist in three-dimensional space, almost like an optical illusion. One yellow figure looks something like a horsetail; another, the ghost of some futurist biomorph. A trio of closely knit blue seems to symbolize a small family. Of course, you can read them in any number of ways. All these works really represent is the artist's concentrated attention to his mark, but they merge representation with abstract so completely one wonders if there was ever really a reason to hold them apart. |