Haberarts.com, August 23, 2009

Two August Recommendations

By John Haber

Alfred Leslie has been called an Abstract Expressionist and a realist, a Pop artist and a portrait painter, an underground filmmaker and a traditionalist, in your face, and simply a painter. He is also a terrific draftsman, and he is arranging his life and work into a series of online artist books (and films).

I don’t like to use this blog for, well, blogging, including announcements and brief notes. I also don’t believe in reviewing artist Web sites. But this is something to see, and so is a show in Harlem.

Late last fall, a life-size Pinocchio lay face down in the Guggenheim’s lobby pool. It owed its existence not to Walt Disney, but to Maurizio Cattelan. Had pop culture drowned in fine art or vice versa? Was Daddy, Daddy an obsession with death, an artist’s ego trip, or a cheap joke?

One could ask the same things about “Maurizio Cattelan Is Dead,” but then the gallery already has. I cannot tell you more about the fake retrospective of a very live artist, because the review has first to appear in print with Artillery magazine. But I do wish to mention it before its closing, on August 23. It is well worth a visit to Triple Candie.