It's always apparent when painter Resnick
is having a show at Miller. The oil paint
fumes hit you as soon as you get off the
elevator. That's the result of his
trademark thick and mottled surfaces. At
79, a survivor of the true Abstract
Expressionist generation, Resnick is the
type of painter's painter that attracts
misty-eyed followers (one such young man
stared reverently at a single painting the
whole time I was at the show). In the 40s
and 50s Resnick worked in a vein that came
directly out of Arshile Gorky and Willem
DeKooning, biomorphically-charged works
activated by charged brushstroke. By the
70s and 80s, the all-over surfaces became
denser, the colors closer in value, the
build-up of paint thicker. The
agglomeration of deep earth tones suggested
that the paint's physical materiality had
become a kind of nature in itself. This
current show is Resnick's second in which a
figurative motif has been introduced. All
five paintings are titled U + ME(all 1995,
oil on canvas). Each medium-large work (the
largest 71 x 117 inches) depicts the same
archetypal scene: two blocky figures
flanking a truncated tree. In some, an
undulating serpent appears. As Resnick has
noted in an interview, the scene is of the
primordial Adam and Eve. The background
fields remain true to Resnick's trademark
style, horizonless expanses of browns,
prussian blues, dusty yellows. The figures
simply float over this like gingerbread
cookies, highlit with shocks of impasto
white. They seem to have very short arms,
or maybe they've been violently lopped-off.
The tree is similarly stunted. Emotionally,
the paintings resonate a sense of death
approaching. It's allegory passed off as a
Beckettian tableau. Despite their
primitivism, they have none of the
brutishness of, say, Georg Baselitz.
Rather, Resnick seems to be feeling the
pull of the old man abstractionist drawn
back into the figuration of youth.
Precedents for this form of
latentbiological determinism can be found
in the late Jungian black enamelpaintings
of Jackson Pollock and the cartoon-
influenced images of late Philip Guston.
It's as if you have to return the figure if
you want to get into heaven.
