Author Description

Al Loving's work is difficult to categorize. With its brilliant colors and shiny surfaces, it would at first appear to belong to the pop art tradition that started in the 1960s, but its insistence on the purely abstract takes it away from pop, which is after all a movement that started out as a reaction against modernist abstraction. Moreover, the passionate feeling and beauty that inform Loving's work place it squarely in the mainstream tradition of modernism. The pop artists - like Duchamp before them - were anxious to eliminate emotion from their pictures, and tried to escape from Renaissance canons of beauty, but Loving wants to make purely beautiful paintings that will move the viewer who is looking at them, and he succeeds. That said, the paintings in the Loving show at the G. R. N'Namdi Gallery in Chelsea differ from most abstract pictures, in which paint (with or without gel) is applied to a flat, square or rectangular surface. Rather, this artist cuts out many smaller pieces of rag paper, especially into spirals, circles, and thick doughnut shapes. Then he covers these pieces with acrylics in various colors and often with patterns: stripes, checkers, lozenges, interweaving slats. Next, he collages the pieces together to form a single larger and far more sophisticated composition which, mounted on Plexiglas or foam core, hangs several inches out in front of the wall that it is attached to, seeming indeed (as the title of the show itself says) to float in midair. These might be called "shaped canvases," but they are infinitely more complex and subtle than the shaped canvases that Richard Smith and Sven Lukin were making back in the 60s, and far more harmonious and uplifting than the garish combinations of angular shapes and dissonant colors with which Elizabeth Murray has more recently made herself known.