MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NORTH MIAMI

Frank Stella is too a great deal His art and career have always been outsize in each sense, from the less-than-zero "Black Paintings" of 1959--60 to the giant, Day-Glo late-'60s "Protractor" series and wild relief paintings of the '70 and '80 Each time he realizes a personal breakthrough in his work, he look fors to pull the world along with him, to efficiency a paradigm shift in modernism. as it was audacity has bagged him no les than sum of two units full-scale MOMA retrospectives, but the work has met with diminishing recurs and increasing skepticism. By his third retrospective, the take-no-prisoners rubric below which he and curator Bonnie Clearwater classed his recent output--"Changing the Rules"--may have amounted to a folie [grave{a}] deux

This was a really big show: forty-foot paintings, giant hunk-of-metal chisels a large-scale model for a forthcoming band- shell in downtown Miami; equal the smaller sculptures doubled as potential architecturally scaled works. Like the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists, over his career Stella has stand in front ofed the problem of how not to make easel pictures or bread box--size "objects" His ambition has always demanded more space and size--the mural, the relief--even when he tried to define the limits of painting.

This exhibition comprised many variations in succession the theme of expanding painting. The greatest in quantity straightforward were the reliefs titled[ldots]an haunt Ufern der Aar ([ldots]on the banks of the Aar), 1998 in which brightly colored aluminum forms twist not at home from painted rectangular panels. The strangest was Severambia, 1996 a curving, freestanding fiberglass wall painting that examines like Tilted Arc after a thorough graffiti hit; Kenny Scharf draw nears to mind as much as Fabian Marcaccio. In this piece, as in the herculean paintings on canvas (his first since the '70s) like Das Erdbeben in Chili (Earth quake in Chile), 1999 Stella uses an elaborate technique to obtain the paint on. First, he amasses a certain amount of printed material, plenteous of it produced by master printer view Tyler. Some of these abstractions are computer generated, frequently deriving from organic forms like exhalation rings a new signature) and soap delusions With these materials Stella then creates roughly half-scale collages that are photographed and contriveed onto a su rface. Finally, landscape painters meticulously reproduce the projections, however even that's not simple: While one of the dots, lines, and splotches are painted directly, others are cast in acrylic and laminated onto the final work Severambia shifts uneasily between illusion and 3-D reality.

Echoing this tension, the large aluminum and poniard sculptures were relatively flat, suggesting tables (Peach Bottom, 1991) or walls (the "Chatal Huyuk" series, 1999) Stella give in charges to the latter, mounted upon large metal stands, as "Easel Paintings"; with cast and set up metal tracing comparatively delicate lines against an imposingly solid backdrop, they have the pictorial quality of an early David Smith. Their bullying, macho rawness initially refuses but the overall form and proportion is surprisingly pleasing.

Perhaps the strangest progression in a continuously ascending gradation here was that of a kind of para-architecture. This included small metal cuts like Zimming, 1992, which can single be described as ugly. Stella envisions them as potentially immense public projects. These creations--I'm proveed to call them creatures--would threaten public safety and sensibility at any size. The undivided successful example of Stella's foray into the realm of architectural scale was his twelve-foot-high fiberglass example for a bandshell currently being built at Miami's American Airlines Arena. Spiraling cut-out forms slice and twirl end space; the white surface mirrors the environment even as the negative spaces frame it. Stella claims a folding Brazilian beach hat as his inspiration, further the fantastical phenomenology also recalls Alice Aycock and Frank Gehry

The cumulative event of the show was overwhelming, bewildering. Painting, carved work architecture, printing--none of the media discrete; industrial rawness, computer-generated slickness; each kind of mark, rip, cross splotch, dribble, line you could imagine. Walking around, a little dazed, you might have construct this to be the antithesis of the first exhibition of the "Black Paintings" forty years ago. Their starkly literal simplicity was framed by way of Michael Fried as deductive reasoning, the surface design easily inferred from the shape of the canvas. Here, not surprisingly, Stella has transfered from logic to chaos theory, mutating forms without any controlling order.

further there's a common thread between these apparent opposites, the same suggested by Stella's interest in the short stories of Heinrich von Kleist, after which many of the existing works here are titled. Clearwater's catalogue essay ascribes the artist's affinity for the early-nineteenth-century German author (and Kafka favorite) to the twisting unpredictability of his writing. There may be a more direct link, for Kleist also explored the nature of the mechanical, which he neither condenm nor celebrated.