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One of the unfortunate occurrences in the change
in format Artezine underwent this spring
was that certain articles were put on hold. None was more
grievous than the omission of one of the best
landscape shows of the season, David Mollet at the
Bowery Gallery
last winter.
Mollet is foremost in a Modernist tradition and
school of painting. Mostly furthered by the
descendents of Abstract Expressionism, chiefly
practitioners of a method inspired by
Hans Hoffman.
Hoffman's acute analysis of the picture
plane could be taught. He educated a whole
generation of artists who were able to put into use
the principles of the master, fusing the
principles of abstraction with various degrees of
figuration. Now there is a second generation of
artists taught by these artists.
What is most interesting to me is that it is that
those who have been processed and educated in the
"Hoffman method" are instantly recognizable to
others with this same background.
I first saw David Mollet's paintings at the Bowery
Gallery several years ago. They struck a chord in
me. This artist was clearly in the Hofmann
tradition. They had structure, depth and clarity.
His new show at Bowery is truly impressive. His
paintings of Alaskan landscape are wonderfully
achieved. Mollet's paintings are masterful in their
completeness. He paints mostly on site and
produces landscapes with depth and clarity. They
are extremely personal, reducing the lush
confusion of nature into orderly geometric
patterns with a personal language form executed
in masterly painterly strokes that seem to flow
easily from his brush. "RAINBOW CREEK FLOOD"
pictures a rushing stream of water set against a
wood comprised of flattened shapes that pile up
one against another to lead the eye further and
further back into the picture.
"BIRCH FOREST" is another excellent painting. Here
Mollet pictures a wood of strong straight trees in
the foreground through which one is able to see
distant mountains and a cloud-streaked sky. The
combination of the warm yellows and autumnal
greens of the forest are brilliantly set off
against the cool blues and violets of a distant
sky, incredible space and depth totally flattened
out in the manner of the Hofmann school.
It was very gratifying to me to see this work and
to realize that the working method so drummed into
me 50 years ago at the Cooper Union by my teachers
Nicolas Carone and Charles Cajori is very much
alive and has had a fruitful flowering in this
artist?s work. There are times when one walks
through contemporary galleries in despair that the
painterly tradition has been submerged in a
jumbled confusion of postmodernist concepts. Some
of us still believe that the path of modern art
might still be linked to the art of painting and
the continuity of a tradition of painterly space.
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