GalleryViews/Chelsea

May 26, 2000

^{All Images are Copyright of  the individual artists}

Hovey Brock @ Jeffrey Coploff, 526 West 26th St. to June 17

Hovey Brock
Maybe the first thing you notice about these seemingly out of focus paintings is the way they seem to vibrate with motion and capture several snapshots of time in one shot.  Brock does with time what David Hockney often does with space - the presentation of numerous views simultaneously.  But the best part of it is that, unlike a photograph capturing a person�s individual movements through space this imagery is unfettered by the figurative.  Brock�s abstract forms allow him to explore pure motion, as subject matter, undiluted with narrative references. We appear to witness tracings of rapidly moving forms that were, are and will be. A pleasant illusionary conundrum is created in wondering what the forms causing these patterns would look like if they were stopped. Small dot(s) of intense color? And yet, the tracings are the forms.

Hovey Brock, The Hokey Pokey, 2000, watercolor on panel, 38 x 48 in

Hovey Brock, Untitled (detail), 1999, acrylic watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in

Other things begin to emerge the longer you look.  The color is rather festive while also muted and adds to the sense of motion.  Then too, Brock couples a curious intimacy in his work with remoteness.  The forms are familiar as though you�ve seen this before but a closer and more prolonged viewing renders them foreign.  They are endowed with an ephemeral, dream-like ambience that teases you with its ungraspable presence. These mostly symmetrical forms are wisely placed off-center and are given plenty of white space in which to breathe and spin. You can almost believe that if you look away for a few minutes and then look back, the action will have migrated to a different place on the ground.

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