Magnus von Plessen at Barbara Gladstone
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell
Magnus von Plessen's paintings propose the value of a subtle, subdued palette, keen eye and sure hand. Composed of brushed layers of oil often scraped through to the canvas, they are to some degree informed by a photographic imagery not readily apparent in the final product. In fact, von Plessen's works are as legible as they are challenging.
Discontinued (all works 2004) has the attractive force of an architectural rendering and is sufficiently large, at roughly 6 by 9 feet, to embrace the viewer in its open field. A structure that resembles the framework of a two-part beach pavilion is more or less centered by a mass of blocks or timbers that lead into and fan out across the canvas. The ground consists of regular, vertical passages scraped down across the painting's expanse like a louvered screen filtering incandescent light.
The paint on the somewhat smaller Allergie (Allergy) seems to have been applied in both directions, then scraped with a blade to create an almost liquid tartan effect. The image features a guitarist in the foreground bent over his instrument and an accompanying musician just beyond. Three inexplicable blocks of painterly white that modulate to blue seem to bounce across the picture plane. A far darker self-portrait renders the artist in profile, his head tipped as though to study a mass of papers or a book held in his hands. In addition to the vertical, scraped louvers that appear here in deep and somber palette, a fan of evenly applied bars of paint occupies a lower corner with a staccato, repeated gesture that recalls the procession of Duchamp's descending nude.
Among works on paper of real charm is a small untitled oil depicting a handsome woman in a figured, sleeveless dress who appears to be standing at an unseen mirror, applying makeup. The paper is torn the length of the drawing and then refitted, as though to emphasize a dual world: the portrayed subject and the mirror of her self-regard. The even more reductive three parts of Rue de Venise have a similar authority. The first offers a chair, table and lamp floating on a field of white; the second, the open door to a room or an armoire; the third, what may be a daybed. Thus focused, the grace of von Plessen's paint-handling comes directly to the fore. Born in Hamburg in 1967, he has had several solo exhibitions in Europe and, in 2002, appeared at New York's P.S.1. This was his first solo appearance in a U.S. gallery.
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