OCT.
1997. By Gerrit Henry
SOHO
Blue, Oil on Linen, 1996
Stephen
Magsig at Chuck Levitan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions
Detroit-based
Stephen Magsig comes to Manhattan's downtown have something to do
with his "day job" as a commercial illustrator. Take, of instance,
Caffe Roma. As is typical of Little Italy's light-deprived streets, it's
impossible to make out the time of day; a sign advertising Italian ices is
almost completely in shadow. The entrance, with its short flight to steps and
glass doors leading to the restaurant, is lit from above, as if evening were
approaching, or already there. The sense is strong that Magsig is -telling a
story with his creamy brushstroke and low-keyed color, a story without people,
without narrative but with multiple painterly incidents marking its plot, and
with light and dark in dialogue.
Unless
Magsig's doorways advertise themselves (as do Caffe Roma and Fanelli), we often
have a sense of not knowing where we are, of being in a kind of generic Little
Italy or SoHo. He often cuts through this anonymity by naming a street in
his title, and sometimes the cross-street as well. Crosby Garage is, for all
the outsized ugliness of its square, gaping maw and battered windows,
esthetically delightful in its sincerity and in its capacity to transmute city
blight into visual gold, right down to the flecks of yellow paint underneath
the windows indicating, in a most plastic way, where the paint on the building
is peeling.
Magsig
remains an unflinching realist while detecting a beauty in Manhattan streets
that may escape those of us who live here. His most recent work features
zoom-lens close-ups of cornices and disjunctive window-glass reflections,
always approached at the oddest angles. Magsig has a right to experiment;
still, I prefer the less baroque, more romantic whole facades, the better to
remind us, without distortion, of what New York still has to offer.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant
Publications, Inc.