"Fresh Paint"
Lehmann Maupin, through Aug 19 (see Chelsea).
By Sophie Fels
This small, focused group show offers work from five artists - Steven Black, David Deutsch, Angela Dufresne, Christian Hellmich and Fabien Rigobert who consider architecture from various angles. All except one (Rigobert) are painters. Deutsch, whose career took off in the 1980s, is the biggest name here; others, who were closer to preschool finger painting hack then, appear in New York for the first time.
Of the three who observe architec-ture most directly, Dufresne (who also has work both at P.S. 1 in "Greater New York" and in a group show at Monya Rowe) offers the lushest views. Her dream landscapes include Me and Bruce Lee and another famous yet unnameable man on the shore in front of an unmade building, a detailed depiction of three low buildings connected across three craggypeaks.
The buildings in Hellmich's work suggest surreal model homes, with facades floating eerily in space. Deutsch's panoramic landscapes include some of the same suburban shapes, but in his case they are rendered so darkly, they evoke noirish surveillance.
Black and Rigobert turn their eyes to interiors and the characters that occupy them. The lone dark figures portrayed against open white grounds in Black's small, dense paintings could be prospective visitors for Hellmich's houses. It's tempting to imagine Rigobert's videotape - included on the premise that it's a "painting" of a sort, a group scene to rival Sam Taylor-Wood and Bill Viola's better-known, like-minded works - as unreality TV, a portrait of his fellow artists making themselves at home in a house that never was.