Alfred DeCredico at Scott Alan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Alfred DeCredico's art is one of heroic gesture. His exhibition, titled "The End of the Hunter," is steeped in romanticism and has a hairy-chested, two-listed quality about it. The large works are mixed mediums on canvas-- about as mixed as you can get, including oil, fur, synthetic fabrics, animal bones or horns, a crutch and a neon light, to name only the most prominent.

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink esthetic inevitably calls to mind Julian Schnabel's work and also that of Robert Rauschenberg. Is the difference one of intent? Rauschenberg's work is cool, never giving away much, even when seemingly autobiographical. Schnabel, for all his impassioned gestures, always throws a knowing glance at the audience. DeCredico appears to take his mythologizing seriously.

In a statement accompanying the show, DeCredico laments the confusion of modern times, as well as the loss of the traditional male role as hunter and provider and the female role as "mysterious locus." He attempts to symbolically recapture the power of these roles through art. Dichotomies abound in the work: male/female, life/death, art/life, sex/death, positive/negative. A standard practice is to juxtapose a light-colored and fairly monochromatic third of the canvas with a brightly colored area of semiabstract figuration. Penis and vulva imagery are apparent throughout. The fur and animal parts affixed to the paintings function as reminders of the natural world outside the painting and as collage elements. There are constant references to fluids: oil, the fluid that facilitates art, and body fluids, carriers of life and, in our time, carriers of the virus of death.

The Stories Men Tell is typical. On the left, "male" side an animal horn serves as a visual pun for the erect penis, while the right, "female" side centers on an oval shape representing the vulva. The horn is emphasized by the relative starkness of its surroundings, while the vulva shape is obscured by the cryptic, elemental forms that swirl around it, reminiscent of shapes in the '40s paintings of Gorky, Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists. I suspect that DeCredico, like those earlier artists, sees the forms as arising from a Jungian collective unconscious.

The problem is DeCredico's insistence on linking his art to larger concerns. In his exhibition statement, he says that the title The Stories Men Tell is about men's tales of their sexual prowess. He adds that the exaggerated penis and vulva propose an animal lust and erotic fixation. But on the part of whom? It is unconvincing to try and make the painting a critique of contemporary sexual mores. DeCredico's overblown rhetoric is unavoidable, even for viewers who do not read his statement. A woman who desires to be something other than a "mysterious locus" may take offense at a painting titled Julietta's Ovaries Are What Make Her a Bitch, and the hopelessly muddled explication that accompanies the work is no help.

DeCredico is at his best in drawings where a single word floats on inchoate forms and is played off against a particular image--for example, when the word 'venom" is juxtaposed with an unrolled condom. These works lack the rhetoric of the grand machines, and the lack of shouting is a relief.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
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