Doug Wada at Dee/Glasoe - New York - painting exhibition - Brief Article

The materials of industry surround us. We use objects without a second thought about their fabrication and the uniformity of their design. In Doug Wada's smart New York solo debut, this young painter used Photo-Realism to great effect, wittily rescuing everyday contemporary objects from their banal surroundings.

Wada must have ridden (and meditated on) the New York City subway hundreds of times. For Untitled (Subway Seat), all works 2001, he painted a near life-size image of those bright orange plastic bucket seats people jostle for at rush hour. The 26-by-81-inch painting of four adjoining seats was hung low on the wall, exactly at seat level. It invited the viewer to think about the perfected beauty of assembly-line manufacturing, something that probably occurs to very few IRT riders.

Untitled (Trash Can) was also low, with its bottom edge seeming to rest on the cement floor of the gallery. A 30-inch-high painting of an industrial-orange New York City trash receptacle, it depicted one of these ubiquitous metal-mesh objects replete with dents, scratch marks and plastic bin liner. Untitled (Air Conditioner) features vents and coils painted in buttery off-whites. Hung high on the wall, from across the gallery it almost passed for a real air-conditioning vent. A stack of blue and white Samsonite-style suitcases in Pan Am and a similar one in Untitled (Luggage Stack) possess the geometric order of one of Donald Judd's wall sculptures.

Wada brings to PhotoRealism a sensibility that is an interesting hybrid of Minimalism, Pop and contemporary abstraction. Pursuing an obsession with linear order and with everyday objects, he produces axiomatic paintings that are entertainingly deadpan and honest; they have the integrity of the real thing.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group