Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Eric Dalbis at Galerie Liberal Bruant

Eric Dalbis at Galerie Liberal Bruant
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Paul Franklin

In his first solo exhibition since 1999, the Algerian-born Eric Dalbis demonstrated that he has a vital role to play in the current renaissance of painting as a force within contemporary art. The 18 oils displayed at Galerie Liberal Bruant, a new contemporary art space in the upper reaches of a stunning 17th-century Marais mansion, are part and parcel of Dalbis's ongoing exploration of painterly geometries as orchestrated through color and light.

Each of the untitled paintings was executed in the past three years. They all possess the same format and composition. On sizable, nearly square canvases (ranging from 46 to 57 inches in their longest dimension), Dalbis nests four planes of color, one inside the other. The overlap is slight, however; the planes build inward incrementally, leaving narrow bands of each underlayer visible at either side, but only the barest edges at the top and bottom. The result is a vast, vertically oriented rectangle anchoring the center and nearly spilling over the top and bottom edges of each painting. The layers of paint bleed into and through one another; translucency is paramount, opacity anathema. Dalbis's delicate touch and his methodical veiling of hue upon hue further animate the surfaces. Serial combinations of robin's-egg blue, mustard yellow, dirty white, grass green, pearly grays and pastel pinks produce shimmering optical effects. The colors were enhanced by the flood of natural light from low windows throughout the whitewashed, L-shaped gallery space. Up close, the complexities of the compositions' construction prevail; from afar, one catalogues the harmonies uniting them as a group.

The artist's devotion to process, his interest in repetition, and the structural importance of both color and geometry to his esthetic project call to mind the work of Josef Albers. Nonetheless, the latter was far more militant in his pursuit of hard-edge, carefully calculated, mathematical precision. With its painterly finesse, willfully imprecise rectangles and well-honed sense of composition and color, Dalbis's work also sometimes suggests that of Rothko.

To consider a fuller range of the artist's art-historical forebears, one must look further afield. Dalbis draws inspiration from the Italian Mannerists, particularly Pontormo, for whom acrid color and exaggerated form offered an ideal means by which to communicate pure emotion. In this exhibition, Dalbis proved that he continues, in his sensual, modest manner, to refine the vocabulary of painting, its lexicon an endless wellspring.

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