The Painter’s Painter
Egan Frantz at Team, NYC
Painting is one of the main tenants of art history, but every so often it can be declared as a tired mode of work. However, the argument never holds up. Painters can surprise and please you. Egan Frantz is one of those individuals, and at his latest solo exhibition at Team Gallery in New York, he displays his eye for line, brushwork, form, and color. Needless to say, Frantz is a real joy for the eyes.
Although the show is simply called Paintings, Frantz produces work that isn’t very simple at all. The artist manages to push painting in contradictory, lush, and beautiful directions. One of the major ways Frantz manages this is by combining various forms of abstraction. Often geometric or lined grids will interface with loose rendering and spontaneous forms. Certain compositional elements even transform across the canvas, as if Frantz suddenly had a better idea: starting out as something controlled before sprinting off into expressionistic forms.
The monumentally scaled Lady in the Radiator is a very fine example of Frantz’s approach to this body of work. The painting is dominated by his vertical lines (this time in black and white) and the wild meanderings of painted line across the measured canvas. The painting reads as musical in some areas and wonderfully frenetic in others.
While the approach to form and line are crucial in this exhibition, color plays a lead role, too. Like the act of painting, Frantz seems to succeed most in the gray area between control and improvisation. Hits of vivid yellow in Twentieth Century Guitar Music (For Lira) are balanced by washed out blue and pink. Another example would be Night Drive, which masterfully organizes a range of hues into surprising cohesion.
With a busy fall season ahead here in New York (and many other cities), there is endless choice in the art you could see. However, Egan Frantz makes a very strong case for himself, and for painting at large
