Tom Friedman, Untitled, 2003
Feature 530 West 25th Street Chelsea
Despite their ostensible diversity of forms and materials, most of the 28 pieces in Tom Friedman's sixth solo show in New York circle back to one theme: drawing and its infinitely flexible fundamentals. Nearly everything on view refers to or incorporates paper, line or pencils -- sometimes in extreme applications. (Extreme, for example, is the life-size aluminum-foil demon, studded with candy and pierced with dozens of pencils, a sugar monster as St. Sebastian.)
Not everyone will see the hairy eyeball on the floor in the second gallery as a mass of line, but it is, in fact, made of wound, embroidered and loose thread. But by then clues have been dropped: a pencil elongated, in perfect proportion, to over five feet; an enormous scribble on the wall that has actually been carefully cut from the paper on which it was originally drawn; and a small block with a doorway that could be solid iron but is paper densely penciled with graphite.
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