Caio Fonseca's semaphoric abstractions.

Caio Fonseca's semaphoric abstractions, collectively entitled "Tenth road Paintings," 1992--93, perform a skittering dance across waxy canvas skins, weighing surface against periodical emphasis As venerable in appearance as works by the agency of the masters of European Modernism, they await as if they had been made in the Picabian machine age, rather than produc on an American now in his early thirties. Fonseca possesse an authoritative visual vocabulary of buoyant geometrical forms, however his resolutely formal manipulations restrain them tightly reined and break little strange pictorial ground. Nonetheless, he fabricates harmonic systems that infuse his canvases with an appealing and palpable energy

For instance, in tithe Street #6, 1992, an ecru bucket-seat-shaped form occupies center stage of a Rube Goldberg--like assembly as jerry-built as it is solid. In tithe Street #2, 1992, a rectangular plank bordered by way of squiggles and painterly strokes rises from a foreground fabricateed from various shades of white like a roughly hewn two-by-four nailed to a weathered protecting enclosure This form, which recalls African fetishes, reappears in tithe Street #4, 1992, bearing a high "forehead" and certain facial characteristics that give it the consider of a windup toy crying revealed to a cosmos of flourishing ephemera. Allowing thin, horizontal rivulets of paint to grid his overlaid territorys the artist regularly makes his canvases be like aged, paint-chipped floorboards from whose layered deepnesss emerge saw-toothed verticals with their hold visual interest. By carefully plotting the application of layers of paint to canvas and then deliberately scarring the surface, Fonseca relieves it of a flatness he assumes otherwise inclined to worship. His is, in fact, a hybrid denomination that formally marries his art-historical antecedents to an esthetic that reclaims and reconfigures the figure of speechs of Modernism. His colors generally stream to earthy tones of fulvid brown, and red, though at times they depart from this palette, as in tithe Street #15, 1993--a taxicab-yellow flight end a broken grid.

tithe Street #8, 1992, perhaps the show's chiefly striking and sophisticated work, is at one time more complicated in structure and simpler in tone than mostly of the other work in succession view. It gets a boost from the artist's use of formal arrangements that recall (as tolerates Adams points out in his catalogue essay) Henri Matisse's The Piano precept 1916. Though evocative of Kasimir Malevich's work, the black, gray, and white geometrics of tithe Street #14, 1993, seem les troubleed with spriritual values than with the more decorative the sames of, say, an Eileen Grey rug In the cessation Fonseca's emergence on the spectacle however engaging, was too closely tied to tradition to make his first solo point out to the high-wire act for which he has apparently been in training.

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