Estes + Picasso at the new Susan Maasch Fine Art.
By IAN PAIGE | January 10, 2007
RAW URBANITY: Prints by Richard Estes. |
Susan Maasch Fine Art is all about collecting. Like a good record shop or antique store, the new Forest Avenue space is subject to a constant shuffling of stock such that the focus is between buyer and seller, with less emphasis on presentation of the work itself. Who needs a gallery wall to get in the way of “that one perfect print” and your deserving dining room? Maasch herself is clearly the star of the show and is happy to work one-on-one poring through the flat files and giving you the chance to get an up-close appreciation for the pieces. You’ll get plenty of collector’s enthusiasm rubbing off on you as well, sans the Jack-Black-in-High-Fidelity attitude.For those dropping by for a quick look, the gallery space will keep you busy. Somewhat cluttered curatorial sensibilities actually work with the commodity approach to the art to create an aesthetic bonanza. Because of Maasch’s penchant for high-profile and desirable pieces, both the casual observer and obsessive collector will find a caliber of work to enjoy that would otherwise require a day-trip to New York.
Where else, thanks to this mish-mash salon style of hanging the work, do you get the opportunity to compare prints by Pablo Picasso and, on the opposite wall, Richard Estes? Matter and antimatter, modernism’s zenith and its negation, the two masters bounce the ball back and forth in a play of compare and contrast.
Estes’s 1979 eight-print portfolio entitled “Urban Landscapes 2” emits a refrigerated chill from its corner of the gallery. Thickly applied ink forms a layered complex of city surfaces and their reflections. Hyperreal visions of pristine corporate window panes bending images of distant skyscrapers like a funhouse mirror contrast with a sun-drenched brick facade and it’s classical flourishes. Human bodies are nowhere to be found. Decades after Atget, Estes looks through the same lens to find an urban environment that has moved beyond shop windows and become labyrinthine caverns of chrome and gullies of tempered glass.
The dispassionate perspective is a hallmark of the Hyperrealism movement that preceded the ironic twists of Pop Art, but “Urban Landscapes 2” takes it one step further to draftsman-like celebrations of Renaissance perspective. In this manner, Estes is something of a neoclassicist, embracing the Hyperrealist destruction of Modernist aesthetics but breaking from the pack in regard to the literal copy. In the tradition of “la belle nature” which selects the most beautiful aspects of different bodies, Estes is incredibly selective about just how much grime you’ll see on the street corner of his near-photographic work. The print series here has the cool calculation of an architect’s proposal.
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Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Painting, Visual Arts, Pablo Picasso
