"Sixty Delicate Works on Paper: Philip Taaffe at Luhring Augustine Tribeca" by David Brody

For the past decade, Philip Taaffe has been showing large and larger canvasses of dazzling variety at Luhring Augustine’s several locations. In his recent exhibition at the gallery’s Tribeca space, the artist scaled down and zoomed in. Showing some sixty delicate works on paper mounted on panel, Taaffe focused on just two modi operandi from his extensive bag of tricks: natural science exotica and the play of symmetry. Most of these works bristle with vintage illustrations of mollusks, crabs, insects, spiders or other creeping, crawling fauna, but in such densely mirroring, contrapuntal arrangements as to create a kind of meta-zoology. Not only the creatures but also the swirling gestural backgrounds are printed and collaged, something of a departure from the technique of the canvases. Newer still is the particular method of printing — a potentially radical development, although so far writ small.

At the beginning of his prolific career, Taaffe captured the zeitgeist by appropriating Bridget Riley paintings, reproducing their curvy motifs with linoleum printing. The modular method, from a decorator’s toolbox, was seen at the time as part of a suave 1980s critique of 1960s Ab Ex, Color Field and, most presciently, Op. But any critique proved to be an exceedingly fond one. In the succeeding four decades Taaffe has enlisted a whole range of printing, stamping, stenciling, collaging, decalcomania and marbling techniques, all in the service of sublime optical buzz. Taaffe’s ready-to-hand efficiencies, far from being cheeky, turned out to be instinctive alchemical rituals with infinite permutations — in a word, painterly.

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