Roger Ricco at Sara Tecchia

As a dealer, researcher and promoter of the work of self-taught artists, Roger Ricco, along with business partner and co-author Frank Maresca (the two founded the New York gallery Ricco-Maresca in 1985), has literally written the book--several times--on some of the most notable figures in American folk art and outsider art. A past recipient of the Rome Prize, Ricco was trained in painting and also makes photographs. This show of large-format C-prints was his first in New York.

His newest photographic images seem to have more in common with traditional studio painters' skill-testing, still-life set-ups, to which they gently allude, than with the more concept-conscious shutterbuggery of his postmodernist peers. They literally came about, Ricco has noted, as the result of his "playing around" with materials found in his studio in rural upstate New York, items such as tree branches, milkweed pods and a small sheet of glass. Mostly shot straight on, in directed light, these exercises in composition and visual texture turn out to have something in common with probing, psychologically aware, painted portraits. Their subjects, however, are inanimate.

Thus, Object 008 (Stick), 2005, illuminates and gives a heightened sense of form and presence to an ordinary tree branch, leafless, leaning against a neutrally painted, L-shaped panel (which reappears as a background in other images). Similarly, the light that dances on the glistening natural fibers emerging from a scattering of little pods in Object 006 (Milkweed Dark), 2004, calls attention to the rich textures and complex structure of milkweed. Small Event 002 (Owl Skull), 2004, is one of the most indelible images from this series; with its top-lighted subject suspended from a string and caught in mid-spin, enveloped by painterly washes of Zurbaran browns, it pulls a viewer's gaze deep into the eyehole of its spooky-elegant form. With its pointed-beak protrusion, the dangling, luminous bird's skull brings to mind a Venetian mask.

As a painter, Ricco has created monochromatic pictures made up of mostly gray acrylic washes on canvas. His paintings re-create televised images from 1940s Hollywood movies, capturing the small screen's comforting glow. Similarly, the studio set-ups that are the subjects of his newest photographs, with their air of dreamy happenstance, express the artist's unabashed interest in the eloquence that ordinary, overlooked objects can reveal when closely examined.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning