RICCI ALBENDA: ANDREW KREPS GALLERY: NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Entering Ricci Albenda's show at Andrew Kreps gallery is like going into a Modernist version of Batman, beams are displaced, corners sucked into vortexes and wordsóthe modus operandi employed in the artist's previous paintings and installationsómorph in and out of the space as if they were animated on a computer screen, despite their completely static painted fixture/structure. kilogram is punctuated with a period and is sucked into the corner of what appears as a positively bulbous growing and glowing room. Screwing with perception, one's reality is checked by encountering architectural variancesóas mentioned the beams are contorted and the walls themselves reallinged so that surfaces become shadows and shadows surfaces. This cohesive visual switch is epitomized by the physicality of the median wall of the gallery, which literally, divides the show in half. From the entrance, a curvacious room swells forth culminating in a vertical pyramidical point:vteef. is the splat here, painstakingly freehand paintedóserif and all. The pyramidical shape's literal shadows playfully are reiterated in the doors' opposing post/lintel structure. Passing then, through and behind the median, which now becomes the second door, one realizes that this room is the realm of the negative. Everything is in the reverse: yellow., pizza., breatheóand looking back ice. and stereo. spin vociferously in the world of the positive. Then it hits you like a spike that the wall has become. The yen to the yangóhere is the portrayal of negative space pulled, sucked out of the room. It is literally the opposite portrayal of the dividing wall's positive brotheróthe gateway through which everything and yet nothing passes. It's vertigo, it's morphing, it's narcotic, it's virtual, it's nauseatingóand the beauty of it is it's static. Nothing moves but your perception. From the lilt and tilt of the deviated walls, to the perspective of the words, the negative/positive world of Ricci Albenda shifts between perception, conception, object, painting, and installation. It's comics come to life. The Riddler is here, so is the Joker, even the Penguin in this icy suction vortexóall trying hard to keep from falling through the wormhole. And just when you realize that the show is about the ideals we hold as sacred to our perception of spatial conception and of object reception, you are glad that this exhibition is just as still as the ground you walk on. In fact this stereo system is as glib as everópunching and knocking us around with the visual bang and smack of a world somewhere in cyberland, and technoworld, but perfectly grounded in static realm of reality.

Devon Dikeou

New York, New York

1998