ART REVIEW : ARTIST’S FIRST EXHIBIT REVEALS MATURE VISION

Anuska Galerie (2400 Kettner Blvd.) is bridging the old and new years with an exhibition of works titled “The Object Shape,” by Michael Golino.

It is a strong show evincing an unusually mature vision for an artist who is having his first solo exhibition. Golino, however, has had an exceptionally cultured background, including several years’ experience working in a variety of capacities at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. There he worked intimately with significant works of contemporary art and some of the great artists of our time. He is now working in the office of prize-winning architect Rob Wellington Quigley.

Golino’s work is proof that the best instruction for an aspiring artist is exposure to the best art. A few significant, random influences appear to be Sol LeWitt, Joel Shapiro, Brice Marden and Frank Stella.

The general characteristics of the works exhibited are reductive geometric forms and painterly surfaces. In all but a few exceptions, Golino has employed a grid incised on sheet lead. The forms of the works themselves are variations on a 3 x 3 grid, most familiar to viewers as a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Usually the two top outer and bottom middle squares are missing, or “negative,” spaces. The essential form, composed of six positive squares, may be read as the archetype of a structure or fireplace. Through distortions of the basic form, however, nine small pieces resemble a flock of birds in flight.

The material Golino has used is ambiguously seductive and sinister. Lead has a beautiful color. It is malleable and easily worked. Tactilely, it is similar to human skin. But it is also a notoriously toxic substance, to be used with caution.

Ambiguously contradicting yet complementing the rectilinearity of the forms is Golino’s treatment of their surfaces. The artist has violated them with arbitrary scorings and “tortured” them with corrosives. With dyes, inks and oil pastels, rather like cosmetics, he has subtly altered and enhanced them.

Each of the major works in the show has its unique attractions. “Mnasthai III” has a corrugated surface with incised arcs like geodesic lines. “Macula” is a simple round shield that looks like an artifact from antiquity. “Mnasthai II” is a pairing of the basic form with a reversal of negative and positive areas. Golino also plays with that negative-positive reversal in two small framed works of great beauty, “Ptah” and “Mnasthai I.” In several works he has used copper squares to great effect.

Three works titled “Glyptodont” seem out of place despite the resemblance of their surfaces to others. Their tooth-like edges--they are “found” forms or scraps--make them aesthetically alien.

The impressive, identically shaped “Director/Directrix” also seem out of place, despite their obvious beauty. In form they are the most reductive statment that can be made and still conceptually imply the nine-part grid that the artist has chosen as a basic format. But, one in stained black wood and the other in pink neon, they are materially different from the rest of the works exhibited.

As a veteran of the LJMCA, Golino knows the importance of consistency and the need for editing works to create a coherent exhibition. They are appropriate concerns.

Finally, there is the matter of the artist’s statement, an egregious example of “artwrite,” beginning: “Onantic social structures direct individuals from cradle to death bed to ignore the repeated available omnific and ontological insites (sic) available to every person at all times making rebellion seem to be the only way to lash out at the repression and confinement of social thinking.”

Go look. Don’t read.

An exhibition of beautiful works very effectively installed, it continues through Jan. 31.