Three Bold Newcomers

By ROBERT HUGHES

The last effort to launch an art "movement" from the frail base of one New York patron's taste took place about a year ago, when Dress Manufacturer Larry Aldrich gave the Whitney Museum a mass of paintings by younger American artists on condition that they all be exhibited under the category of "Lyrical Abstractions." The show was a complete flop. Even New York--where the omnivorous appetite for meaningless art categories would test the digestion of a goat--rejected this offering: the name meant nothing and the members had nothing in common. Yet the event did involve a few artists of strong and serious talent, all of whom repudiate groups. And at a time when the death of abstract painting is monotonously proclaimed from various Manhattan pulpits, it is worth considering that these men have provided a large share of the rather sparse pleasures of the current art season. Among them:

David Diao, 28, came to New York eight years ago from Gambier, Ohio, where he had been studying philosophy at Kenyon College. In his new show at the Reese Palley Gallery, his work, which once was austere almost to the point of impalpability, has taken on a peculiar density and resonance. Thick swaths of glossy acrylic are rolled onto the canvas in 5-ft.-wide swipes, and then buried by further layers. "I wanted to get away from all those tricks and nuances," says Diao. "I like to just lay a color down and leave it." The broad squeegee marks involve, for Diao, "the ends always reflecting the means--it's an idea that has become rather banalized by process art, but it's still an essential part of painting." The paintings are drenched in harsh and unappetizing color: the dark blue and bland bathroom-blue halves of Untitled, 1971, could almost go into a motel. But their relationships, as one edge of paint slides behind another "like theater curtains," are always controlled just this side of visual cacophony. By taking up some of the most overworked aspects of abstract expressionism--the extravagantly rich paint, the sweeping gesture--and presenting them in this faintly ironic form (one of his titles, The Triumph of American Painting, was also the title of a recent tome on the New York school), Diao has produced one of the most promising shows of the year. "The problem," he says, "is always to avoid a clique situation. I'm against the Marxist idea of art history as direction. The idea of connecting myself to some orthodox style bores me--I try to fight it."

Philip Wofford, at 36, is scarcely an abstract painter at all. The pictures in his current exhibition at SoHo's Emmerich Gallery all involve the general experience, if not the detail, of landscape--not as seen by the eye's perspective, with sky at the top and earth below, but as though taken apart and rewoven into an expansive shifting pattern of space. Wofford, who teaches art at Bennington College, regards a visit he paid to the Southwest in 1968 as one of the key experiences in his work--especially some nights he spent camping on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which provoked a long autobiographical poem named Grand Canyon Search Ceremony as well as a number of paintings: "It was a holy atmosphere, so silent, so vast; I was stunned by it."

This has been one of the familiar themes of American art ever since the Hudson River School--the idea of epic landscape, which gives rise to the parallel idea that the actual making of a picture is some kind of journey. And for Wofford, whose attitude has been much influenced by reading the memoirs of an Oglala chief (Black Elk Speaks), landscape ought not to be separated from the way American Indians perceived nature: as an assembly not of dead earth and dumb plants, but of sentient presences. Some of this comes through in paintings like Star-Weaver, with their panoramic veils and zigzags of light, their flecks of paint that suggest flowers, mica deposits or dust: a soft immanence, vulnerable and pantheistic. Unfortunately, Wofford overworks his paintings. The light stiffens into crusts of inert pigment. But if the picture surface is sometimes cluttered, the effort to complicate it remains salutary and even brave.

Robert Zakanych exhibited at Reese Palley last November, and a new artist of singular grace and power seemed to have arrived. Praised as a colorist, Zakanych--a solidly built, Midwestern-looking 36-year-old who actually hails from New Jersey--denies the classification: "People are always trying to tell me I'm a color painter. In fact my work is just about painting." Nevertheless, color is the overriding content and subject of Zakanych's work. He manipulates it with stunning precision, by dividing the canvas with a grid of close rectangular intervals and then producing tiny, almost imperceptible grades of hue and intensity from one block to the next. The result is "a constant movement across the painting, and up and down. There isn't one color that remains stable; I don't want viewers to be able to lock into a basic color and say, for certain, that this or that painting is red or blue." In works like Sapphire, 1971, the fluttering accumulation of yellow, red and purple across the grid is so eye-fooling that, after a while, analysis stops; instead, one submits to the pressure of light that emanates from the field. Color becomes an absolute phenomenon; it needs to depict nothing to reveal its action. It may be that no American painter since Rothko has contrived to transform pigment into meditation more effectively than Zakanych. "I got completely sick of all the cool, boring, systematic painting that was around in New York a few years ago," he says. "I'm trying to break that down." And, it seems, succeeding.

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