By John Goodrich via nysun.com
Painters have traditionally used unusual points of view to dramatize their subjects. Picture the upward-spiraling clouds in Tiepolo’s ceilings, or the low horizon and vast skies of Dutch landscape paintings. Amer Kobaslija gives this approach a new twist, employing an exotic viewpoint for roomfuls of ordinary clutter.
In his eight large panels at George Adams, he depicts in painterly detail the contents of a small, windowless studio.In some, the walls are bare, but most depict numerous paintings hanging or leaning against the walls, along with the usual studio bric-a-brac: a palette, cans of Turpenoid, the remains of a fast-food meal. The tension arises from the wideangle, overhead view that turns walls into crazily angled planes.In most paintings, a stepladder stretches upward toward our point of view, showing the artist’s rather prosaic means of gaining his viewpoint — and making us co-conspirators of sorts in his obsessive pursuit.
Like the paintings of contemporary artists Rackstraw Downes and Jackie Lima, these works probe the nature of our perceptions and conventions for depicting space. How to re-create, in fixed strokes, impressions that are absorbed sequentially by the moving eye?
Mr. Kobaslija’s deadpan humor, however, is all his own. The artist appears only once in these panels, as the sandaled foot on the ladder at the bottom edge of “Artist in His Studio” (2006). In other paintings, that ladder’s top step hovers tantalizingly close to our eyes — but without his foot, as if he had levitated moments before. In “Con te Partiro” (2006), a camera on a tripod stares upward at us like an inquisitive animal, providing another clue about his process. Almost all of the paintings are diptychs and triptychs, but with the images flowing continuously across the seams, the divisions serve mainly as teasing reminders of the panels’ flatness.
The artist’s painterly talents are especially evident in “Artist in His Studio.” This 10-foot-wide panel achieves a majestic breadth in its view, sweeping from a busy desk directly beneath our eyes to the open, far end of the room. In all the paintings, the artist conveys the quiet radiance of the unevenly illuminated walls; shrewdly, his brushstrokes align with their steep perspectives, emphasizing the plunge to the floor. He also captures the effect of the paintsmeared floor with — well, smears of paint.
After these first, bold delineations of space, though, the artist’s descriptions become more passive. Some highlights on plastic chairs and suitcases feel pallid. Other colors tend to label objects without giving density to their intervals; background objects in “Con te Partiro” press forward so confusingly that the ladder seems almost a refuge.
The intriguing result is that even as the artist tests the limits of perspective, he doesn’t look far beyond its powers. Pictorial depth is an elastic quality; Bonnard’s spaces, built of contradictory pressures of color, convince even as they defy perspective. But Mr. Kobaslija avoids this particular dive into the unknown, finding plenty of drama in his eccentric viewpoints.
Kobaslija until August 18 (525 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-564-8480). Price range: Gallery declined to disclose prices.