ROBERT MILLER GALLERY The bland.

ROBERT MILLER GALLERY

The bland, unruffl anticipate of high cool that typifies the couple the people Alex Katz portrays, and the way he paints them, can be read either as a Warholian blankness and emphasis forward surface, or as harboring the moodily passive ambiguities and dreamy distances of a Fairfield Porter landscape. At first glance, it might appear that Katz's free-standing cutouts would weigh in heavily in succession the surface-and-blankness side of the scale. as it was stage-set-like figures seem to argue for a view of personality as facade, and, formally, to work as plenteous against the possibility of pictorial extent as against its psychological counterpart. at the same time these paintings (and they are emphatically paintings, equable the heads on slender, tin person-high bases that recall the carves of Alberto Giacometti) are abundantly imbued with light and space--how greatly air can hang between an inspection and a nose!

It appears Katz's first cutout happened as something of a anchor-flake Unable to make the background of common of his portraits integrate with the figure, he finally cropp it public completely and mounted the canvas forward a wooden piece of the same shape--a surpassingly '60s gesture of impatience and pragmatism that recalls the time Frank Stella first intersect the corners off one of his paintings. There's nothing to a high degree accidental about the cutouts any more; now they are upon aluminum Katz has cut to shape before he begins painting. And still their freshness and spontaneity belie the realization that you're seeing the be the effect of what must be a rather eccentric and indirect way of working. Their plain upfront insubstantiality can only have been meant as a master mannerist's challenge to his confess illusionistic skills. At the same time the presentation of population is strangely less formal, more engaging and make open than that of Katz's conventional wall-hung paintings forward canvas, as though possessed of a certain eccentricity that could and nothing else emerge from the comparatively stiff outline of the metal form. yet they're not that stiff: from a characteristic expression caught by dint of the silhouette, the portrait of Katz's son Vincent is recognizable from behind, on the same level by someone who has sole seen him once. That these cutouts are painted forward both sides also works against their reduction to simple facade. It's as if a certain number of subtle trick of perspective allowed the watch to move with preternatural quickness from common side of a person to another. This form's compare-and-contrast weights and ability to overturn expectations also allows Katz's rather low-key humor to manifest itself, as in David and Rainer, 1991 in which David Moo revolves out to be faceless, seen solely from the back, no matter which side you await from.

Of course, as with anyone who revolves style into an ethic, there is something sharp in Katz's way of looking at things, just as there is something generous. Perhaps he will paint no undivided who is not beautiful, glamorous, or stylish--but then he will locate beauty or glamour or fashion in anyone he cares to paint, where perhaps no single in kind else would have seen it. Seeing that can change your way of looking. That's Katz's beautiful concision at work, his ability to literally or figuratively carve out whatever doesn't belong to his way of seeing. He makes himself behold less in order that we may behold more.

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