VENICE

When Chuck Arnoldi first introduced his stick “paintings” in the early 1970s, his work was seen as a refreshing (now highly dubious) attempt to counteract the austere, reductive tenets of Minimalism with a return to a more seductive, organic strategy. Since then, Arnoldi has applied his formal agglomerations of twigs and branches to both sculpture and the print, using them as a sort of gestural, symbolic “brush stroke” rooted in natural processes.

Since 1983, Arnoldi has been creating a series of large-scale monotypes, cutting shapes into sheets of plywood with a chain saw and using the rough-hewn results for transfering paint to paper, much like a printing plate or woodblock. By superimposing several impressions, he is able to create monoprints that resemble paintings, each composed of a complex, viscous cross-hatching of stick forms in a broad spectrum of colors. The works draw largely upon Abstract Expressionism in their effusive, all-over perspective, yet also allude to the flat, herringbone abstracts of Jasper Johns, and, by Arnoldi’s own admission, the logjam paintings of Marsden Hartley.

Although this might sound like a provocative historical mix, in Arnoldi’s hands the work has sunk into predictable formula and questionable aesthetics that stress pattern and bravura process over formal visual experimentation. This might make for admirable interior design fodder but it doesn’t add up to a viable representational or abstract theory.

Arnoldi’s titles--in this case derived from prisons (Attica, Soledad, Sing-Sing) or criminals (Capone, Oswald, Gilmore)--seem as arbitrary as his compositional parameters, and merely designed to imbue the work with a toughness of purpose and visceral edge that was lost from the moment of the first saw cut. (New City Editions, 525 Venezia Ave., to March 8.)