Brad Spence "Of Age" @ Shoshana Wayne

I set out really wanting to like this show, I suppose, mostly because Spence's last couple of shows have left me thinking, thinking about color, surface, and luminosity in relation to thin veils of imagery, ones at the borders of perception.  In this most recent showing, while there are a number of moves, certainly a whole repertoire of approaches, it was far too dense as an installation of paintings for my liking (and not for any valuable purpose that I could tell save the speculative notion of a lots of garments hanging on the rack (commodities for sale).

If I had to pick a favorite, though, I guess I would choose the one that looks most like Eddie Van Halen's Kramer guitar from 1984. Come to think of it, most of this show has that era's feel. "Desparately Seeking Susan" also springs to mind. So, parallel nostalgia is in play (teased hair ambiguities)… Aside from decadent, glammy connotations, each painting as raw form seems to investigate the very relation between mark and field, but just exactly how deep can this whole inquiry go? A proposed answer seems to lie just above/beyond the surface, somewhere between jizz lobs and stretched mesh (fabric, as always, the sign of painted support, at least since textiles have been industrial).