(already subscribe? log in).

2012 deCordova Biennial features true good works amid false steps

aRT REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 27, 2012|By Sebastian Smee

(Page 4 of 4)

Antoniadis and Stone’s trompe l’oeil aesthetic is enjoying considerable currency in art today, not just because there is a nostalgic thirst for evidence of great labor and skilled craftsmanship, but because trompe l’oeil can endow mundane, obsolescent objects with secret value - the value, one might say, of labor - in this sense rescuing them from disarray and decay. Antoniadis and Stone do beguiling things with this dynamic.

My favorite painting in the show was by Cullen Bryant Washington Jr., who was born in Los Angeles, lives in both Roxbury and Brooklyn, N.Y., and like Mark Bradford, uses paint and photography to articulate tensions and questions in African-American masculinity.

The work is called “The Final Frontier,’’ and it is a big abstract-looking painting, largely in black, but with broken white lines cutting horizontally across it. The lines suggest a road, and we might think we are looking down at the dead, unforgiving opacity of a bitumen highway.

But, as with most such roads, there are hints of glitter and shine in this particular surface, and Washington has played these up to create the possibility that what we are really looking at is the vastness of space, with its smattering of twinkling, far-off stars, its clouds of speckled matter.

All this is done with paint. A small spacecraft in the bottom left corner suggests that the subject of the painting - the person who is entering this expansive dream - might be a young boy. And the ambiguity of the image - its self-sufficient vastness and this small, dissonant detail, a spacecraft, inserted in a corner - keeps it beautifully alive.

There are other works in the show worth mentioning: the paintings of Ann Pibal, the videos and photographs of Matt Saunders, the lovely embroidered textiles of Anna von Mertens, and the black-and-white photographs of Matthew Gamber. But these promising, good, or interesting things were outnumbered by lightweight gestures of cling film conceptualism - cut off from fresh air, refrigerator-ready, coddled in cleverness.