Bram Bogart at Marlborough Chelsea - New York - Brief Article

Born in Delft, Holland, Bram Bogart is well known in Europe for large abstract paintings made of outlandishly thick layers of oil pigment mixed with a quick-drying medium. Now 81, he lives and works in Belgium. Paintings by this tachiste pioneer have been linked with those of artists such as Antoni Tapies and Emile Schumacher. Bogart's dense surfaces, however, appear closer in feeling to the monochromatic sponge paintings made in the late 1950s and early '60s by Yves Klein and to the more recent, heavily encrusted compositions by Nabil Nahas.

In each work, Bogart slathers on the pigment in a billowing matte froth. Each color, usually an unmodulated primary, has a Pop art intensity. The overloaded canvases, often mounted on wood, are sometimes so heavy that they require freestanding metal supports like thick easels.

For this exhibition, Kenworth Moffett selected 17 major pieces that constitute a broad overview of Bogart's achievement of the past 25 years. Blanc de Brabant (1977), nearly 8 by 7 feet, hints at the artist's formidable contribution to peinture matiere of the '50s and '60s. Here, a white monochrome field made of piles of chalky pigment is disrupted at the center by a vertical white brushstroke about 2 feet wide. Apparently applied with a single, ferocious gesture, the brushstroke sweeps the height of the panel.

In slightly later works, the markings seem less gestural and the compositions more deliberate. For example, Ardoise (1981), the enormous (nearly 7 by 9 feet) counterpart to Blanc de Brabant, is a solid black field whose subtle, symmetrical composition was attained by scraping two smooth rectangles on either side of the panel. Bulging clumps of pigment frame the smooth areas. Perched on its stainless-steel support, Ardoise appears as an awesome, immense void, absorbing all the light in the room.

For the most part, however, Bogart's work is full of blazing color. One of the brightest and most powerful pieces in the show, Madame Braque et Madame Picasso (1993), approximately 7 by 9 feet, is an arrangement of large rectangles in searing yellow, red, blue and white. In spite of the allusion to Cubism in its title, the reductive composition is an apparent homage to Mondrian and to Dutch painting in general. In this piece, and in every work on view, Bogart evokes the rich sensuality of van Gogh's surfaces. Based on the strength of this exhibition, Bogart deserves to be much better known in America.

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