Michael Rees at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Michael Rees's loony work runs the gamut between sterile and serious, wily and weird, funny and bumbling. Rees is like a perverse rube following a comic muse, who almost gets it right. The floor-bound sculptures (all from 1993) that made up his second solo show evoke a zoological ludicrousness--a feeling that you're looking down at a set of pathetically piggish, trog-Iodyte creatures whose ways of moving or eating or mating are so hopelessly odd that you can't imagine how they will survive outside Rees's warped imagination. The pieces can take on a quasi-human pathos. You want to reach out to these oddities, to touch one, perhaps, or take it home as a pet.

Rees, 35, is a sly artist-- sometimes too sly for his own good, because his work can easily spill over into archness or empty out into blandness. You feel like he wants to raise eyebrows-never a good thing. Each one of these untitled log-like sculptures sprouts fingers or, in one case, baby legs from its ends or middle or top. Made of acrylic emulsion on plastic composite (in other words, bumpy paint on plastic tubes), Rees's recent work forgoes the messier process-oriented techniques of his last show (in 1991).

He asks good dumb questions like, "How would this volume move around? How would it eat--or protect itself from being eaten? How would this thing reproduce?" Study a given work carefully and you can determine exactly how it might move by the direction and the placement of the fingers (or other vestigial appendages). One work drags itself along from the front, another (a hexagonal mutation) tiptoes across the floor, while a brownish lozenge shape has fingers sprouting, antenna-like, from the top and no "legs"at all (this is the best piece in the show). His colors are so nondescript as to stir curiosity. A tilting centipedelike thing with fingers at its midsection stands tentatively on beige particle board. This creature attempts to camouflage itself by blending in with its base. Not bad.

But there is a troubling repetitiveness to Rees's show. He seems to have hit on an idea and simply not developed it enough. At first, l loved thinking about these truncated, clublooted impossibilities; later, the dachshundlike tubes got to be a big bore. Rees's art works best when it's good the way a really bad horror film is good. You go along with it without asking why. You follow its outlandish internal law and you're satisfied. But right now Rees seems to be running on autopilot--he seems to have settled on a formula too soon. Let's hope he changes course, because this show had a saucy uncouthness and a shadowy impropriety about it that suggest ample room for growth.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
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