Page 59 - Studio International - February 1967

Now I hope I have offered the reader enough to rectangles of colour. But the paint quality holds often views of beaches, sea and clouds, are subtle
enable him to decode the work—a task which can the promise of other forms; it is this which saves narratives, quick with his innate feeling for earth,
probably be done with the photograph alone, his painting from being an exercise in reduction. sand, and the elements in general, and fashioned
although even about that I'm not sure. Smithson's with consummate skill.
determination to use the repeat, so much a part of Costantino Nivola, a Sardinian who has lived for
architecture and ornament and so alien to sculp- many years in the United States, has never lost his The modesty and quality of the exhibition of
ture, is too much of an intellectual decision to deep feeling for his Mediterranean roots. It younger draughtsmen at the ALLAN STONE GALLERY
satisfy me, but I can readily see that he is much emerges more forcibly than ever in the small bronze is very welcome. Drawings are rarely offered for
better at it than the others on the same quest. reliefs and sculptures in his exhibition at the their own sake in New York. Among the half
BYRON GALLERY. Nivola draws on antique myth dozen younger artists represented with several
Larry Zox, on the other hand, seems to be moving and the peasant traditions of his own country, as works each, I admired particularly the small
away from the assignment of equal intervals well as his reflexive memory of Italian Renaissance pastel variations on a landscape in tondo form, and
toward a more dynamic spatial vision in his latest bronze prodigies. His figurines are as delicately the pencil studies by Edward Eichel, who has
paintings at the KORNBLEE GALLERY. ZOX still drawn and tender as those of the sculptural gathered up various modern systems of drawings
begins with a pencilled grid, I think, but his forms sfumato masters of the Quattrocento. His reliefs, into a convincing personal style.
are considerably more ambiguous. The diamond
shapes now tilt unaccountably and the large planes
are delineated in such a way that they veer off the
picture plane into spaces that are highly variable.
He achieves this complexity without abandoning
the simplicity of his colours, and without seeking
any but the most economic forms—squares,
triangles and the leftover of both when truncate.

James Bishop, an American painter living in Paris,
offers his first one-man exhibition at the FISCHBACK
GALLERY. Bishop strives to hold on to the freshness
of a loose oil technique, while severely limiting his
image. The result is a pleasing, if incomplete,
proposal.
Most of the recent paintings on view were devised
in a kind of masked image : for instance, the upper
quarter of the canvas is divided into two or three
bands of dense, loosely-applied colour, while the
lower three-quarters is a white rectangle. The
white, then, serves as a screening or masking
device, giving the colours above a curious weight.
The completion of the image necessarily takes
place in the eye of the beholder.
The free-hand painting technique adds to the
suggestiveness of Bishop's paintings. It is true that
he is puritanical in his forms—just bands or

Above Jim Bishop
Folded 1965
Oil on canvas 77 x 77 in.
Above right Costantino Nivola
Young Girl
Right Edward Eichel
Interior with rooster 1966
Pencil 10 1/4 x 13 1/4 in.