DAVID GIBSON WRITING

    When Tom Fruin was first on the scene, with his installed collages of drug paraphernalia, I remember the excitement that these works incited. Here was an artist whose work was about introducing elements of the depraved, anarchic, and malevolent into contemporary art. The drug bags were a new element in contemporary mixed media art because they were not only an extremely marginalized detritus, but that they were also representative of the substantive presence of drug use within the art world. In some commons, the use of drugs is synonymous with success: the ability to acquire illegal substances being in some way a measure of the power of the user, and the freedom to use, or abuse them, proof of the legitimacy of the role of the artist, who will always exist in some way at the edge of society.  At some point after 9/11 (the tragedy of which made all lesser attempts to pay lip service to the melodramatic role of the madman artist seem like caricatures), Fruin grew up. H

MARTIN WEINSTEIN There are a few specific concepts that are made comprehensible through art. These are endemic to the basic process of creative vision, and they tend to construct a bias, or force the flow of a specific passion, so that one can become devoted to one choice over another. In the world of traditional painting, the divergence begins in school, where classes are taught in either body or landscape painting. Or to put it in other terms, a choice between depicting the intimacy of bodies in all their brick and mortar realness or the intimacy of the living environment which envelops us. No painting can put another’s flesh in our hands, or present us with the experience of standing upon a mountaintop or running barefoot through the grass. But art can both depict and enact a quality of perception that allows us to live beyond the banality of the moment. The image of a landscape is what we think about when we hear the word itself. Yet what is attempted, and in many ways achieved by

Curated by Robert Curcio ELGA WIMMER GALLERY 526 West 26th Street, New York / November 6-29, 2014 The dozen works which comprise the retrospective of Rob Mango each in their own way represent a watershed event in the artist’s development or life experiences that he unknowingly shared with others. If the artist is the representative idealist for our time, believing in ideas and manifesting expressions that are purer and more primal than the product of any other industry or milieu, then Rob Mango is one of the best versions of such a figure. His work is emboldened by the idealism associated with formalism, its relevant social conscience, and a measure of idiosyncrasy, all without equal. Each of the works on view has a specific story to tell.   The Superman Theory (1984-88), is both a cabinet of curiosities and a hall of heroes. It occurs quite early in Mango’s artistic career, shortly after he first moved to New York, a period when he was momentarily breaking with the realistic

  There are a few subjects that rarely rise to the surface for discussion. One of these is the condition of extreme age. Writers who reach their older years evade the subject, preferring to deal with it through metaphor, or by use of a story that takes place in the distant past. Few allow that the here and now can contain such difficulty. Tsaurah Litzksy is not one of these. Her new collection of poems, Jerry in the Bardo , deals specifically with the ailing years of her father, Jerry Litzky, who suffered from various ailments that lessened his ability to function as an independent human being, and eventually, to be accepted around others as sane and normal. Her book is suffused with an undying empathy for his struggles as an elderly person. Starting when her father turned eighty, he began to exhibit behavioral changes that set him apart from what she knew of him at an earlier age. The challenge of infirmity for the elderly is only part physical, it is also primarily emotional, as thes

Elsie Kagan's painting is a form of revelation. It commingles a search for beauty with a sustained effort to manifest how reason, reality, and temperament can aid us in the creation of something new. Mining the history of artistic expression, searching for touchstones and wellsprings of inspiration, and being able to turn that research into a living and breathing new expression that can aptly invigorate the contemporary perception of beauty, is what Kagan does in her work. Kagan's is not only a technical virtuosity but an educated way of painting that refuses to lean on ability alone. It desires a greater statement, one that is filled with the promise of creation and the threat of destruction. There is a primal element in abundance that builds and drives her interest in genres and art movements: a systematic use of energy that creates a dynamic force within each work and throughout her entire oeuvre. Kagan's system is her combined use of historical styles co

In many ways a gallery is a stage, lacking only a proscenium and seats. In the case of conceptual artist Jason Dodge, there are acts and there are props, and art emerges between them. For his recent exhibition ‘We Are the Meeting’, Dodge presented us with off-stage events, evidence of suspicious acts, and charismatic objects that connected the aesthetic moment of a gallery visit with an event of significant symbolic order. What appears at first to be a random selection of mundane objects with no correlation to one another, or to any system of implied meaning, begins to reveal layers of narrative verging on the dramaturgical. Dodge is not altogether concerned with providing an experience of clear-cut artistic value; his works do not 'look like' art but more like specimens of evidence at a crime scene or an archeological dig; they are models for the advancement of a form of social anthropology.  The first room holds a lightning rod, pointing nor

--> Art teaches us about the importance of form, but where does art get its ideas? This is a question that is aptly addressed by the sculpture of David Adamo, whose recent exhibition presented the gallery visitor with a form they might never expect to see in a white cube. Adamo is fascinated by the forms inherent in Nature, and how their implicit realness can not only charm or convince but also obfuscate. Adamo uses sculpture as a form of metaphysical or ontological excavation. He starts with a material and an idea, and with both in hand, he digs at the material or amasses it, shaping and sculpting until forms emerge to fulfill his concept. Nature itself presents a version of the real that clashes with the ideas of art history, displacing them. Adamo's objective this time was to recreate an object that exists only for a specific class of insects; termites who within certain climates are driven to create massive vertical mounds. The mounds are reduced in siz