Donald Evans at Tiber de Nagy

Examples of Donald Evans's richly imaginative postage stamps and manipulated postcards were on view in Tibor de Nagy's second show devoted to this American artist, who died in 1977 in Amsterdam at the age of 31. Filling a small side gallery, these minutely scaled celebrations of real and imagined worlds were presented on 13 black Vario stock sheets, common to philatelic collections.

Evoking exotic nations and personal systems of meaning, Evans's work calls to mind the colonizer's scientific interest in cataloguing the new species and different customs of the colonized lands. Recorded on the images are country names taken from friends, songs and places he visited. For example, one sheet of 13 multihued stamps documents the Drinks of Barcentum, including "koffie," "citroen," "jonge" and "sherry." Another set reveals the delectable Fruits of the Tropides Islands. These images are replete with monetary values and apparent perforations, in imitation of real stamps. In Pears of Achterdijk (Beurre de Merode), Evans took actual postcards of pear species, affixed hand-painted postage stamps that exactly reproduced the images of the fruit on the cards, and then canceled them with a rubber stamp reading "Donald Evans/Amsterdam/1972," celebrating his move to that city from the rural village of Achterdijk in that year.

The most beautiful pieces employ prismatic hues, like Plums of 1976 with its six-by-six grid of stamps of plums such as "Belle de Louvain" and "Warwickshire Drooper." Here, rainbow tones ripple diagonally across the sheet and the carefully depicted fruit lie in the center of each stamp like pinned specimens in a naturalist's drawer.

Evans worked in a period when photography and simplified graphic designs were replacing engravings on stamps, and nationally distinctive postage was on the wane: annually from the early 1960s, most United Nations members issued thematically similar stamps; after 1963 over 100 nations issued John F. Kennedy stamps; and more than 150 countries celebrated the lunar landing of 1969. By contrast, Evans's stamps commemorate the unique indigenous cultures of his invented locales. In our era of globalization and increasing international homogeneity, Evans's philatelic fictions evoke nostalgia for an earlier age, of artistically crafted designs and geographical and cultural particularity. While it is tempting to position them in the post-Pop artistic world of the 1970s, of grids and repetition and mechanical reproduction and conceptual art, they are better seen as the poetic products of an infinitely creative mind, of a man whose obsessions of order and exploration resulted in intensely pleasurable, and disarmingly wistful, works of art.

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