by Mark Rosenthal.


Many prototypical works of early abstract art, indeed, some of the objects one thinks of as masterpieces of the movement, for instance paintings by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, present a seamless painted universe. In the case of the former artist, shapes and colors are carefully balanced so as to produce a dynamic equilibrium; with the latter's so-called allover patterns, there is the effect of an evenly distributed, unified field. It was this sense of an unsullied world that came under attack by Jasper Johns, among others, first in the 1970s. In his crosshatch paintings, Johns usually juxtaposed an ostensibly neutral scheme of hatch marks along side and almost identical area in which some kind of 'accident' seems to have marred the aforestated purity. John's paintings suggested abstraction had become, in some sense, dysfunctional, that its presumed innocence could no longer be maintained. Numerous artists followed John's example but in new and fascinating ways.

David Row's paintings usually consist of two, three or four panels which are dynamically balanced as in a Mondrian, except that by comparison with the Dutch artist, Row constantly emphasizes a kind of discontinuity between the parts and the patterns painted on them. Just as the eye becomes accustomed to and comfortable with one pattern, it end ubruptly. Though it may continue elsewhere,the configuration has been dramatically interrupted or broken apart. Boundaries become crucial in this type of painting, boundaries that must be traversed before a difficult, if impure, equilibrium is achieved. Row almost always makes reference to circles, which of course suggest the kind of perfect order that earlier abstraction had posited. But in his work, the circle is constantly beeing mooted and undercut.

In a profound sens, Row's paintings imply a sense of disorder, which is common theme in the postmodern outlook. He has described the 'abandonment of a Kantian ideal [with] the introduction of a fractured quality'. To be 'fractured' in Row's case is a permanent injury, for his parts have been separated ostensibly without possibility of mending. Such a multiplication of parts is in direct contrast with the Romantic idealism of many of the great exemplars of abstract art, but in keeping with the reality of the human drama and chaos that one finds to be the truer condition of the present world.

Row writes: 'Can we accept the irrational, the ambiguous and the incomplete?' For him the sense of the subjective is crucial in art, but it is not the heroic subjectivity and exhilarating freedom of the Abstract Expressionists as much as the fragile provisionality that accompanies an ingrained sense of insecurity about the firmness of the world's bearings. Thus does Row reform and 'fracture' the earlier formulae of abstraction, and suggest a new formal-curn-thematic interpretation of non-referential art. The truth is that we no longer perceive abstract form self-referentially.

David Row: 486 'Study for Muscle Pool'. 1998, Öl und Alkyd auf Papier, 30 x 40 cm

David Row: 484 Ohne Titel. 1998, Öl und Alkyd auf Papier, 30 x 40 cm