Robert HamelineRobert Hameline is of the savage school. Textures are rough with nails and painted branches sticking out from the surface, paint is applied thickly, almost brutally, chunks of wood are assembled to a sculpted assemblage which also includes brick face and petrified mushrooms. These pieces aren't pretty. The colors are shocking and unreal. The artist tries to wake us up but it's sometimes too random an approach. Though each piece is somewhat contained in a balance of geometric form, some seem too easy as if the structures were imposed as an afterthought. We're confronted and challenged by these works but once past the initial shock impact, if we're not repelled or bored, looking closely, it is sensation and explosive unfocused energy more than a studied effect we're left with. That is, craft is sublimated to passion and with no outline this is dangerous. Some sections of work seem random and not worked enough and in other sections the absence of precision tends to lessen the effect of the craft involved. This isn't dainty stuff to be so refined yet that's precisely what we need to serve as reference and these works lack that and are their weakness. Unfinished surfaces don't work like silence in music. They look ignored. Some landscape imagery does manage to poke through like a distant memory but it's interpreted through his present sensibility of thick impasto and charged rendering. We have to constantly change aesthetics in order to judge modern art fairly, to keep up with its developments. You can't look at these pieces and say they don't please you the way an Impressionist painting does, or that they don't have the solid symbols of consciousness of a Kline or Pollock. The formal effects achieved by the old masters, and which so delight us, are not here. It's a new ballgame. While we might bemoan a loss of delicacy, this is one of the prices of the threat of nuclear annihilation. This is a more negative era we live in. We're constantly denying the final trigger. Artists like Hameline attempt to convey something of the horror using methods equivalent to it. These pieces couldn't have been executed before Hiroshima. Only since then have we been forced to explore so publicly such an unbridled terror—a Pandora's Box of ugly, horrific potential released. There's no time anymore to seek perfection, this art says, but what is art for then. If art is no longer merely about glorifying nature, our imaginations and our methods, if it is forced now to deal with the inherent possibility of total destruction (something artists before 1945 never had to consider) do its methods and process have to be revealed so blatantly? Does this imposing threat supplant the notion of craft? Of course not. The final result of an act of creation is only the product for us voyeurs/viewers to witness. More important is the artist at work, in the process--with differing degrees of peace and passion—molding, bringing into being, propagating something new. For themselves. It is a private search. These pieces show too much of the search. The product of the process must become more than its methods. I think, though, that these pieces by Robert Hameline distinguish themselves in spite of the ideological criticism I've imposed on them. The works are daring and in these conservative times their fiery spirit and wackiness is welcome and necessary. They don't aim to fit the mold of any market or placid public. their anger, too, is evident. These pieces aren't meant to be adored for lovely effects. They're nor ornaments to hang domesticated in some patron's living room. Some lovely effects are achieved almost in spite of the brutality of the brush work. Garish colors are mixed together and thick heavy dabs are smeared into each other from which some shapes, inferences and just interesting patterns and fields of surface emerge. The rudeness is fresh and the eye-startling combinations of the various surfaces that work as fields as of a visible realm of a higher than pedestrian consciousness. In spite of its unfriendly surface, art like this does attempt to contain a new, wild, renegade energy so as to present it in some form. There's no act more generous. This work is brave for an uptown gallery to exhibit and the young Hammerstein Gallery deserves credit for taking the risk. |