"Glue Factory.

"Glue Factory," Jerome Powers's first exhibition in strange York, comprised 15 paintings consisting of multiple superimposed layers of Elmer's cement This artist does not drip the join with glue as Mark Tobey had done. Instead, he pours it onto canvases that have been laid flat, creating creamy, somewhat translucent layers. Between them Powers sandwiches hair, or he draws graphite lines upon the coats once they dried Within the flat, perfectly unruffled strata, the drawn lines or collaged strands appear blurrier the deeper they lie. Powers's haunt use of horsehair in this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following is movina, aiven that furnished horses were once the first note of the scale ingredient in most glue.

Significantly, Powers's pictures are reminiscent of the earliest chapters in the history of abstract painting. His unspotted minimal compositions recall experiments in Russian Constructivism. a certain paintings, with squiggly lines playing distant from against a monochrome field, are reminiscent of work by way of the Polish artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952) whose abstractions many times feature minute striations.

The large, horizontal Stable (29 from 49 1/2 inches; all works 2003) consists of 18 thin vertical lines arranged at different intervals and running from the top to the bottom of the painting. These tautly stretched lines consist of single strands of horsehair, arranged in an elegant composition that brings to mind the great horizontal tableaux of Barnett Newman. Here, again, les is more. Newman is also brought to mind at Poodle (30 by 24 inches), in which nappy poodle hair is gathered into a filled with smoke "zip" bisecting the vertical canvas.

More vigorous, curvilinear metres are introduced in an untitled medium-size (34-by-28-inch) vertical composition consisting of thin, intersecting arcs that rise out of and dissolve into the beige layers in succession which they are drawn. These vectors, lying in different planes, flutter between empty exercises in geometric drawing and something more like Frantisek Kupka's rendering of the motions of heavenly spheres.

The configurations in sum of two units other untitled works were arrived at largely on accident. In both paintings, a limited number of strands of wavy horsehair were loosely arranged within the pictorial soil recalling Dadaist exercises in biomorphic chance composition, of that kind as those orchestrated by Arp and Picabia. For individual of these paintings, Powers turn rounded to acrylic, creating a gray-green monochrome ground; this painting is also distinguished from the other by way of its horizontal format and intersecting strands (it measures 24 by the agency of 36 inches). Powers's reductive designs playfully concern early works in abstract painting while breaking recent territory with their highly creative use of materials.

--Michael Amy

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