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Joe Naujokas at Katharina Rich Perlow - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 1997 by Nancy Grimes
In his first New York exhibition, Joe Naujokas presented fastidiously crafted paintings of studio interiors that borrow liberally from Cubism. Using devices like windows, paintings within paintings, trompe l'oeil effects and collage elements, his ambitious works assault distinctions between inside and outside, past and present, reality and illusion.
Although Naujokas's rigorous designs and tidy linear drawing style attempt to order these varied components, the paintings nevertheless look like pictorial garage sales. Viewers must pick their way across masonite panels overloaded with variously colored and textured planes, as well as a plethora of objects and images. Adding to the visual confusion, the windows and the paintings within paintings, usually cityscapes, fracture the shallow space of the interiors by providing dizzying perspectives and panoramic urban vistas.
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In Angel, Naujokas divides a section of his studio into four roughly equal quadrants. The lower right-hand quadrant shows a desk with half-opened drawers, a big crook-necked squash, a bucket, a straight edge and a level. Portions of the window and a beamed ceiling appear directly above this still-life arrangement. Just to the left, two small paintings--one abstract, the other a portrait of a winged nude sitting with her legs spread--rest against the bottom of a large painting of a cityscape that fills the work's upper left quadrant. In simples terms, Angel is a composition of interlocking rectangular planes interrupted by two organic elements, the phallic-looking squash and the erotically posed nude.
Presumably, Naujokas fractures the cohesive space of the studio in order to interweave two narratives. The first is the story of painting the cityscape, which stands, half-finished, on an easel surrounded by the tools of its construction. The second story suggests an erotic encounter which intrudes upon the artist's work, either as memory or fantasy.
By mingling realism and Cubism and introducing competing narrative threads into a single composition, Naujokas creates a daunting, often even annoying, visual cacophony. The paintings abound in jangling dashes of complementary colors and disorienting shifts in scale, and almost every image is rendered with equal clarity, like a piece of music in which every note receives the same emphasis.
Naujokas commands respect for his independence. He reexamines two unfashionable painting styles, and, rather than parrot trendy, critically approved themes, he draws his subject matter from his own experience. But the works cry out for a good editor.
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