Luck of the Draw
Mark Lombardi's works on paper are scandalous. Yet the little jolts of pleasure they provide are quite unscandalous.
Unquestionably, Mark Lombardi's works on paper are scandalous. Yet the little jolts of pleasure they provide are quite unscandalous; but rather, rarefied, intellectually satisfying, almost stately.
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His complex flowcharts document dancelike movements in the covert international exchange of money and influence. The information recorded in his diagrams was not fanciful; it came from The New York Times and similarly respectable sources. From them Lombardi gleaned and wove together myriad transactions involving (in different charts) offshore banking, the CIA, the Vatican Bank, China Ocean Shipping Co., Space Research and Armscor of Pretoria, South Africa, and Clinton, Lippo and COSCO.
Since his death in 2000, Lombardi has become increasingly collectable. His most prized works are enlivened by an occasional notation in red pencil.
Of the three artists in Gallery Joe's current show of drawings, Lombardi may be the most conceptual, but Bruce Conner's inkblots and the layering of tiny Hebrew letters in Jacob El Hanani's drawings share a similar arcane quality. The blizzard of miniscule markings in El Hanani's work sometimes resembles strata of snow piled on a sill. Subtle variations in density suggest settling and vagrant currents of energy. Gallery director Becky Kerlin keeps a magnifying glass on hand to examine works like this.
In other pieces by El Hanani, titled "NoF" or "NOF," the Hebrew word for line coalesces from delicate atmospheres of minute hatchings, or rows of stitchlike vertical lines.
Bruce Conner's compositions of small monochromatic inkblots seem positively down and dirty beside the work of the other two artists. Conner, best known for his assemblage, has enjoyed making ink blots since childhood and here composes vertical rows of them almost like strands of jewels. The drama of an isolated Rorschach blot is not the idea here, but rather a chain of chance events uniting chaos and order. Most are sequences on accordion-folded paper, but collage elements have been inserted in various ways.
The work of all three artists concerns language related through the discipline of patterned mark-making. All the work is also partly determined by things outside the artists' control: financial matters, space-filling marking or random spills of ink. Related strategies, unique results.
Drawings: Bruce Conner, Jacob El Hanani, Mark Lombardi
Through Dec. 16 Gallery Joe, 302 Arch St., 215-592-7752, www.galleryjoe.com
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