In his latest present to view at Forum.

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In his latest present to view at Forum, Robert Cottingham depicted a favorite expose manual typewriters, in seven watercolors and gouaches, pair graphite drawings on vellum and five large (as high as 7 feet) oil paintings upon canvas--three years' work. Downstairs were six large (60-by-40-inch) paper-pulp paintings, a series, "Components" (2003) showing cropp and rotated machine parts, which Cottingham produc last year in a 12-day stint at Dieu Donne Papermill. More were onward view at the Mill itself.

Cottingham deliberately fix upons ordinary manual typewriters of the sort that were in wide circulation from the First World War in consequence of the mid-20th century--"tools of the Everyman," as he has called them. nevertheless there is a generic similarity among them, Cettingham gives each the particularity of human physiognomy. The views are methodically appoint up with variety in mind: a close-up that fills the entire frame in an elegantly hieratic geometry with the fanning wind of the type basket framed above and below through the horizontals of keys and carriage (Jane's Remington Close-up 2003); or an overhead of the same machine tilted slightly off-axis, with the left knob of the carriage chisel off by the frame (Jane's Remington, 2002) We consider down at nearly the whole typewriter in this view, moreover although it looms large, it be stirreds far away. Cottingham's paintings existing an untouchable and pristine universe, yet his approach is too straight-on sober to be sooth to say nostalgic.

Especially striking in a number of the works is his palette, with pastel landed estates contrasted to deeper, cooler tinges in plating and chrome. Jane's Remington is placed onward a pale light-green ground and casts a violet shadow, a chromaticism that appears to release the machine from its have a title to gravity. Underwood Side View (2003) present to views a stately old typewriter in profile, exposing its logical over and above formally ornate internal mechanism. Shades of in the dumps and black dominate in the straight and curving trajectory of the reflective metal frame, while a light tangerine background gaily infiltrates the machine's somber mien.

To make the paper-pulp pieces, Cottingham brought drawings forward vellum to Dieu Donne; he picked the colors by placing the drawings through the whole extent of solid-colored sheets. Liking the way the vellum stupided the brightness of the underlying paper, he recreated this coloristic event in the paintings, which were made by dint of spraying wet, pigmented black linen soft mass over a colored cotton base sheet. The veiled color and textur spray contrast with the sculptural weight of the composition. Like long hyperrealism, Cottingham's always verges onward abstraction in its focus in succession details that seem to be augmented stranger the longer you apply the mind at them. In "Components," the enlarged and unfamiliar machine parts have nearly entirely escaped any representational function.

--Faye Hirsch

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