at Jan Abrams Fine Arts
and Mitchell Algus
Gallery

White Light, 1962, mixed media

The Mitchell Algus Gallery exhibited four works from the artist’s early career. Antonakos first focused on the earthly realm of the material--“sewlages”, stuffed pillows, and assemblages. White Light (1962) a wall mounted sculpture of found objects and red neon offers expression through matter. Antonakos draws in space with extended wooden chair parts creating a shadow play that surrounds a fur lined box. In this work concentric neon circles highlight these carnally loaded objects. The glass tubes and incandescent bulb though light emitting are weighted in substance and lack the resolution of his simpler neons

The exhibition at Jan Abrams focused on Antonakos’s works on paper including studies for neon installations, collages and drawings. Antonakos’s renderings on plastivellum seem to defy the material relationship between medium and ground. Through intense color saturation and flat, dense application, the pencil strokes in works like J#1 (1987) seem to be painted. These hard edged marks demonstrate the ground’s resistance as the pigments tenuously remain on the translucent plastivellum surface, and do not penetrate the paper’s fibers.

Antonakos achieves a transparency effect, allowing light to pass through the pigments and reflect off the ground. Like the artist’s neon sculptures, his pencil colors are luminous sources of spiritual light that transcend their physical facticity. The hard edge forms and the color saturation in the drawings also give the impression of machine manufacture. Upon closer examination, however, one sees the artist’s hand making constructive strokes that vary in direction and density. Moreover, each stroke is heavy on one side and light on the other, thus allowing light to more effectively penetrate the pigment and further the reflective blending effects.

In A-63-95 (1995) the artist renders varying colorful areas on the composition’s top half using Impressionistic pigment juxtapositions. He repeats the stroking on the bottom, but in graphite’s reflective gray. The dichotomous relationships presented in this work are unmistakable: vibrating colors and a placid achromatic, matter and light, illusion and flatness, labored precision and automatism. From the four decades of drawings in this exhibition one realizes that Antonakos has been rendering in space his entire career, and not only in his large public neons. Antonakos is a mystic insistently working with material presence in order to overcome it.

William V. Ganis

Stephen Antonakos: Early Assemblage and Blue Box, 1965 is on view at the Mitchell Algus Gallery November 21 - December 25, 1998. Stephen Antonakos: Selected Drawings is at Jan Abrams Fine Arts December 1, 1998 - January 15, 1999.