Art: Three Bold Newcomers

The last effort to launch an art "movement" from the frail base of one New York patron's taste took place about a year ago, when Dress Manufacturer Larry Aldrich gave the Whitney Museum a mass of paintings by younger American artists on condition that they all be exhibited under the category of "Lyrical Abstractions." The show was a complete flop. Even New York—where the omnivorous appetite for meaningless art categories would test the digestion of a goat—rejected this offering: the name meant nothing and the members had nothing in common. Yet the event did involve a few artists of strong and serious talent, all of whom repudiate groups. And at a time when the death of abstract painting is monotonously proclaimed from various Manhattan pulpits, it is worth considering that these men have provided a large share of the rather sparse pleasures of the current art season. Among them:

David Diao, 28, came to New York eight years ago from Gambier, Ohio, where he had been studying philosophy at Kenyon College. In his new show at the Reese Palley Gallery, his work, which once was austere almost to the point of impalpability, has taken on a peculiar density and resonance. Thick swaths of glossy acrylic are rolled onto the canvas in 5-ft.-wide swipes, and then buried by further layers. "I wanted to get away from all those tricks and nuances," says Diao. "I like to just lay a color down and leave it." The broad squeegee marks involve, for Diao, "the ends always reflecting the means—it's an idea that has become rather banalized by process art, but it's still an essential part of painting." The paintings are drenched in harsh and unappetizing color: the dark blue and bland bathroom-blue halves of Untitled, 1971, could almost go into a motel. But their relationships, as one edge of paint slides behind another "like theater curtains," are always controlled just this side of visual cacophony. By taking up some of the most overworked aspects of abstract expressionism—the extravagantly rich paint, the sweeping gesture—and presenting them in this faintly ironic form (one of his titles, The Triumph of American Painting, was also the title of a recent tome on the New York school), Diao has produced one of the most promising shows of the year. "The problem," he says, "is always to avoid a clique situation. I'm against the Marxist idea of art history as direction. The idea of connecting myself to some orthodox style bores me—I try to fight it."

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Philip Wofford, at 36, is scarcely an abstract painter at all. The pictures in his current exhibition at SoHo's Emmerich Gallery all involve the general experience, if not the detail, of landscape—not as seen by the eye's perspective, with sky at the top and earth below, but as though taken apart and rewoven into an expansive shifting pattern of space. Wofford, who teaches art at Bennington College, regards a visit he paid to the Southwest in 1968 as one of the key experiences in his work—especially some nights he spent camping on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which provoked a long autobiographical poem named Grand Canyon Search Ceremony as well as a number of paintings: "It was a holy atmosphere, so silent, so vast; I was stunned by it."