ARTnews, April 2007

Mixed Signals: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Here was a giddy hodgepodge of work by a handful of big-name artists and some intriguing “outsiders.” The show, with no overarching theme, spanned some 60 years and offered drawings, collages, and paintings that explore personal obsessions, fantastic landscapes, and invented territories.

Among the more familiar offerings were three Henry Darger scenes pitting little girls against grown men in strange military uniforms, and another Darger work featuring a malevolent creature with a doglike head called the Malferian Blengiglomenan Serpent (n.d.). A more rational view was provided by Mark Lombardi’s three “charts,” including his Bill Clinton China Resources (n.d.), which documented links among politicians and money, and two Roxy Paine prints that resembled sheets of tiny stamps, each of them bearing a self portrait or an image of a creature from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

But it was the lesser-known artists who gave the greatest visual delight. Yun-Fei Ji’s three small drawings from “The Empty City” series (2003) showed spectral figures, ghoulish skeletons, and men in gas masks engaged in mysterious rituals. Tim Wehrle’s Urban Nature (2006) was like a Persian miniature of pickpockets preying on one another. Shima Cho made a rigorous geometric abstraction from four 19th-century fabric-sample books. And Lee Etheredge IV applied type from an IBM Selectric onto sheets of yellowed paper to produce modest but eloquently minimal designs.

Some of the artists, like Lombardi and Roy Ferdinand, who paints scenes of urban desperation, were clearly making social statements, while Janet Sobel and Felipe Jesus Consalvos’s dense compositions veered into obsessive personal territory. One wondered what mainstream abstractionist Suzanne McClelland and Conceptualist Chris Burden were doing in this group, but it was hard to quibble with choices when there were so many beguiling surprises.

ANN LANDI