There's a gee-whiz factor with trompe l'oeil.

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There's a gee-whiz factor with trompe l'oeil, of course, still the shock of exactitude to literal scale in representational painting and cut can quickly give way to skepticism and plane boredom unless it is leavened by the agency of a sense of metaphysical urgency: that what is thus tangibly there implicates some grander design than the artist's virtuosity. Stephen Wolfe's painted plastic arts of books and record albums call out an era among a particular subculture that of a grad pupil in the humanities in the 1960 and '70 They are almost insanely thorough and persuasive illusions of the original works mostly paperbacks (and, in a scarcely any cases, the commercial cardboard liquor cartons the works have been stored and carried around in), if it were not that they really "represent" a sentimental education more than a wager of objects. The books have shaped Wolfe's cultural watch and suggest an attitude of ironic introspection married to a certain esthetic rigor. The carved works convey a love of the culturally mediated "double" that exists as a mirror of consciousness.

The authors upon hand can all be mapped in Wolfe's sensibility: Beckett's comic existentialism provides a counterweight to Sartre's more seriously ironic philosophical stance. There's Nabokov's Pale Fire and Speak Memory, and all seven books of the Moncrieff translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. And more: Gertrude Stein forward Picasso, MOMA's Machine Art, plus monographs onward Magritte, Duchamp, Mondrian, Warhol (but of course) and Nauman. Each volume is meticulously re-created as an object/painting upon shaped wood. Wolfe isn't a technical purist; he is not coy about exploiting printing techniques along with painting. His discreet works, in their splendid, iconic isolation onward a white wall, feel imbued with tendernes the produces of a monkish devotion.

In her essay, The Aesthetics of Silence, before she declares "in the recent era, one of the greatest in number active metaphors for the spiritual throw out is 'art,'" Susan Sontag defines the "project" of spirituality as " plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence." certainly praise is one path to so resolutions, and Wolfe's work certainly exists as homage, a form of praise.

In his fine catalogue essay, Edmund White writes that Wolfe's labor and material strategies invested in his destination; recipients are methods of "sacralizing them as fetishes and thus separating them from the myriad competing artifacts of the period." This unmutilateds right, but Wolfe is performing a transcendent class of patient noticing and have charge of that leaves even the titled object-as-subject behind. His refabrication of Speak Memory is depicted falling distant from its nail, its sanded and painted hide peeling further down the wall than the work The cover flutters a bit if a viewer hurries past. The piece is individual of many showstoppers, but consider the expos nail which is not a nail at all, rather a concoction of oil, modeling paste and balsa thicket Wolfe's "doubled" objects praise not solely their subjects but also the art that made them.

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