Cleve Gray at Ameringer Yohe

During the last three decades of the 20th century, Abstract-Expressionist painting mostly looked tired, which is another way of saying that over-familiarity had desensitized the art public to its strengths. Out of the spotlight for so long, abstraction--some of it, at least--has begun to look good again and also has to be reevaluated. Because the relative importance of Cleve Gray, who died in 2004, remained uncertain even during his lifetime, this show served to bring his work before the public again for a fresh appraisal.

Two widely separated time frames were represented: a selection of paintings done during Gray's last years, and several from the late '70s. His early method was to lay down a solid plane surface of finely nuanced acrylic, on which he superimposed an off-center area of painterly gestures in oil and/or acrylic. Gray's paint-laden brushstrokes typically lashed up and down, developing a roughly circular ideogram composed of several layers of different pigment, the first strokes visible beneath later additions. Calling them "ideograms" is a reminder that one of the sources of Gray's esthetic was Asian tradition. In The Sound of the Pearl in the Ear of the Dawn (1978), he begins with a gamboge-yellow plane and works onto it, left of center, four thick black brushy strokes, then overpaints these with four downward, incurving slathers of pale pink that join at the bottom. This multilayered island hovers over the picture plane, with a few upward splashes of paint, demonstrating that Gray placed the canvas on the floor while working.

A certain mystique has developed in the past decade about "late works" of artists. The paintings Gray completed after 2000 don't conform to the notion that artists simplify their working methods in the concluding phase of their lives. Because he then began using oil stick for the top layer of figuration, a new complexity came into his painting. A calligraphic esthetic, Asian again, came to the fore, showing affinities as well with French tachisme and lettrisme. One of the liveliest works is #29 (2003), which uses a pink background for several calligraphic thickets of red, orange, yellow, blue, white and black filaments, festively scribbled and intertwined. We see a lot of tangled string or wire in art now, usually with negative connotations. But Gray's use of tumbleweed knotting is celebratory or, as in Release #11, august and mysterious--a fitting capstone for the work of an artist as distinguished as he is hard to pigeonhole.

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