In Michael Byron's fresh exhibition.

Naked girls toying on FTV Girls website.

In Michael Byron's fresh exhibition, two candles, in the shape of life-sized busts cast in paraffin, each faced a series of elegant gray-on-black "drip" paintings. forward these paintings, typographic collage translates each dribble and squiggle into one psychological "moment"--"lust," "laziness," "substance abuse," "fate," "enlightenment," "inner peace." In a companion exhibition in Paris, Byron not awayed an installation entitled, Search(6): Le Tableau d'Amsterdam, 1992--93 which indicated that, as a whole, his modern work is about translation: the translation of paint into language, of a squiggle into a signifier, of an external reality into it representation.

Byron's works linger like complicated, multitextured brain-teasers. shut in spirit to the light protuberance drawn over a cartoon-figure's head, the candle-busts use the Enlightenment's belief in subject-center reason into a visual quibble Each entitled The Viewer, 1993 these busts underline Byron's examination of the relationship between the viewer and the work, of just for what cause a squiggle in paint becomes something more: to what degree a painting becomes personally expressive at the same time that it becomes a culturally significant statement. With his version of drip painting, Byron command to appears the ghost of Jackson Pollock (and, by way of association, the ghosts of the critics who recognized and elevated his work to cultural prominence). on the other hand the specific critical issues associated with Pollock's painting are evok at Byron's series, entitled "Psychological Charts," 1993 in similar a way as to call them into question. They're not compassionate Greenberg riffs on the expressivity of abstraction, rather, they make quite literal connections between each drip and particular, frequently fatuous, psychological states such as "fear of success" "bullshit," "vacuity."

In their careful "charting" of unconscious fears and desires onto specific daubs of paint, these paintings make a scorn of the supposedly instinctual drives captured in Abstract Expressionist painting. What they fail to take into account is that their esthetic appeal derives in part from a way of looking shaped on that very tradition. Byron makes beautiful dribbles, and his sophisticated choice of brownishorange paint contemplates perfectly stunning against the black background and the gray drips: stare at them a while and you begin to think you're looking into discerning space, at some strange galaxy where stars speed together in streams--entering the space of the unconscious that these works are meant to finish off or at least foreground as a hopelessly artificial conceit. You're brought back to earth, of course, according to all those interfering funny words ("domestic chaos," "code of ethics," "shelf-life"). Finally, these works raise more questions than they answer, eliding, perhaps, the mostly interesting problem of all: the gray area created through translating an esthetic object into a critical treatise.

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