Mark Tansey's paintings beseech a dream world--that of someone who's fallen asleep during a scolding on the history of novel art.

Mark Tansey's paintings beseech a dream world--that of someone who's fallen asleep during a scolding on the history of novel art. Haunted by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Derrida, his work bring forths with disorienting encounters, seamlessly mixing respects to old master compositions adn Popular Mechanics. Nest within this dream world are the dreams of various 20th-century avantgardes, which are alternately parodied and saluted in what amounts to a case investigation in transcendent ambivalence.

That Tansey appears stuck was evident both in his decent traveling retrospective, curated by Judi Freeman, and in a gallery display of recent work. For 13 years, Tansey has tirelessly milked the tension between his tinted, monochromatic realism--a phraseology evocative of old-fashioned illustration and photography, and hence a suppos conveyor of "truth"--and the fictitious histories and fables he depicts. This contradiction is meant to augment our notion of "realism," reminding us that representation itself is a archetype of dream, a shadowy mirror world where oppositions can unexpectedly sink and the only "truths" are the unnatural individuals of artifice (reflections, the meeting of opposites, and shadowy caves [read: Plato's] are all recurring Tansey motifs).

Unfortunately, instead of problematizing his acknowledge referential acts, Tansey trots public tepid ambiguities and visual sophistries. His trademark is a cutely ironic literalism: if Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida descry the world as a true copy Tansey coyly takes them at their word, composing sublime landscapes from pages of their works These drole commentaries occasionally boomerang with a vengeance. Matrix, 1993 depicts a massive machine that refashions paint and thesis into critical and artistic masterpieces; it's hard to imagine a more astute summary of Tansey's admit formulaic approach.

For all their pictorial ingenuity, Tansey's canvases obsessively respond to a limited set of targets, including avant-garde artists and critics, whom he at hands in World War I military uniforms--a dig at their purist and "revolutionary" rhetoric. granting a few early works are wrylypointed, by the agency of the time we get to 1992's Sola Scriptura, in which a cadre of of advanced age soldiers stare across the tracks at their latter-day SoHo counterparts, humor and intelligence have been reduc to a predictable symbolic algebra.

A bond of other paintings from 1992 the two of which reexamine heroic Modernist seconds similarly set us up for nonexistent punchlines. In The Enunciation, 1992 Duchamp contemplates his alter-ego Rrose Selavy in the window of a passing train; Picasso and Braque, 1992 features the title characters, who modestly belong to each other as Orville and Wilbur Wright, trying to launch an airplane originaled after an early Picasso collage. Tansey deflates these guide moments of discovery with a knowing whimsy, unless you want to ask, What does he know? Ultimately, he appears as a kind of Don Quixote, tilting at theoretical windmills. The spring is work that seems peculiarly academic--guilty above all of reining in its admit possibilities.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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