Below is the full text of Ed McCormack's review of David Tobey's paintings and sculpture exhibited in his November 7-25, 2006 one-man show at Pleiades Gallery in New York.
"A Symphonic Flow
Animates David Tobey's Abstractions"
"Although other visual artists have drawn analogies between
abstract painting and music, David Tobey can speak with
special authority on the relationship between the two art forms,
being both a painter and a professional violinist who has been
performing for over thirty years. In fact, recently when Tobey's
painting "Exuberance" was reproduced on the program cover
for the Music Conservatory of Westchester's 75th anniversary
concert at Alice Tully Hall, as well as on a large poster displayed
outside Lincoln Center, Tobey performed as guest conductor for
part of the program.
"Growing up in Westchester, as the child of the well-known
historical illustrator and muralist Alton Tobey and the renowned
concert pianist Rosalyn Tobey, David Tobey got a firm grounding
in both of his artistic disciplines from an early age. But while his
father was his first art teacher, the fact that he eventually gravitated
toward abstract painting (a genre closer to music, which by its very
nature is the most abstract of all the arts) indicates that he may have
been even more influenced subliminally by the sound of his mother's
piano, presumably as it resonated from another part of the house as
she practiced or rehearsed. In any case, the visual/musical synthesis
at which Tobey arrived, after graduating from the Julliard School of
music and studying at The Art Students League, seems a natural
outgrowth of that formative experience.
"For those, like myself, however, who have been familiar with only
Tobey's paintings since his first solo show in New York City in 2003,
the sculptures also included in his latest exhibition will reveal a whole
new facet of this artist. The show, a benefit for the National Scholastic
Chess Foundation, can be seen at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25th Street,
from November 7 through 25, with a reception on Thursday November 9
from 5:30 to 8:30 PM.
"One should not be surprised that Tobey would endeavor to capture an
equally musical sense of movement, rhythm, and spontaneity in his
sculptures as in his paintings; yet one cannot help but be impressed
nonetheless by how well he succeeds, given the unyielding nature of his
medium, welded metal. Tobey exemplifies the approach that the Spanish
sculptor Julio Gonzalez espoused when he pioneered this medium in the
1920s: "drawing in space". Tobey achieves a unique draughtsmanly fluidity
in metal, surpassing even that of Gonzalez, as he duplicates the forms in
his paintings in three dimensions, particularly through his use of gracefully
curved rods to convey a similarly linear quality, or uses organic shapes
in combination with more geometric forms to invest the contours of his
pieces with a sense of flow and flux.
"Those who saw Tobey's first Manhattan exhibition may remember that
he titled it "The Structure of Energy". That felicitous phrase still applies
in terms of encapsulating what his work is really about: the syntheses of energy
and form, of vitality and control. And while it was descriptive in the first
instance of his paintings, the same dynamic applies to his welded steel sculptures
like "Junk Yard Dog," in which various found metal objects, such as a large
spring, screws, bolts, and other salvaged industrial debris are employed much
in the same way that Tobey layers skeins of pigment in his acrylics on canvas.
"The main difference, of course, is that in Tobey's sculptures, form alone must
do the work of form and color. This could seem a formidable handicap, since in
his paintings, Tobey is a sumptuous colorist, combining brilliant hues in both
painting and music.
"However, Tobey more than makes up for the absence of color in his sculptures
by virtue of the fluidity of his forms, in pieces such as "Conductor," where the
metal rod at the top of the piece, supported by a welded welter of more baroque,
anthropomorphic shapes, wittily suggests a baton. Other metal sculptures such
as "Quixote," "El Toro" and "Moon Archer" also emulate the hide-and-seek
element of figuration that animates Tobey's abstractions, where one is initially
seduced by formal elements only to encounter allusions to the visible world on
prolonged viewing. Although it is a delight to suddenly discover the mounted
knight within the freewheeling abstraction of Tobey's "Quixote," or discern
the contours of the horned bovine in "El Toro," this sense of delayed recognition
is especially appealing in "Moon Archer." For here, the circular shape at the
top of the piece seems to function both as the simplified head of an abstract
figure aiming an arrow and a lunar orb, making concrete metaphor for the
poetic title.
"As for Tobey's paintings, they continue to evolve at a pace with his native
talent, as seen in the brilliantly colorful and richly configured large canvas
called "Bishop Takes Rook," which according to the artist emulates how
chess masters strategize to formulate a dynamic approach to the game while
creating concealed patterns and relationships within, with linear images of
chess pieces hidden within the composition's intricate configurations of swirls,
set against a brilliant red ground. While the artist's use of gracefully sweeping
loops of black and yellow poured paint as the dominant forms in this work might
recall Jackson Pollock, the more deliberate calligraphic dance of the underlying
linear networks is more akin to the work of Mark Tobey, a namesake to whom,
as far as one knows, David Tobey is not related.
"Among several other strong paintings and sculptures, perhaps the centerpiece
of David Tobey's new exhibition is "Fallen Angels 9/11," a large acrylic on
canvas, painted in 2002, that alludes to the video images of the terrorist victims
who were forced to leap to their death from the burning Twin Towers, which have been burned indelibly into our communal memory by the news media. Through the merciful auspices of abstraction, the artist transforms the horrific into the symbolic, creating an image as mythical as the Fall of Icarus. In this powerful, vertiginous composition in a palette dominated by red, white, and blue, David Tobey demonstrates that his visual music can be somber as well as uplifting."
--Ed McCormack
Gallery & Studio Magazine
