Rubens Ghenov’s paintings employ an abstract visual language of controlled spills, color-gradient shapes, and slender lines to conjure the displays of books, objets d’art, and pictures typically found on bookcases in the offices and homes of intellectuals. Where Carol Bove mined post-hippie Northern California with the books, feathers, and rocks in her early shelf-sculptures, Ghenov invokes the cosmopolitan collection of a fictional twentieth-century Spanish poet, Angelico Morandá, in the recent works (all 2016) he exhibited at Morgan Lehman.
Ghenov pours translucent acrylics and inks onto his canvases, creating opaque geometric forms that recall the abstract hallmarks of Concrete art, the avant-garde movement that originated in Brazil, where he was born. In Silence Fiction, Orchid 1, matchstick-thin lines separate and frame various parts of the composition: a silhouette head made of a purple-green spill on a lemon-yellow ground, a stack of books in front of a mirrorlike panel, and white shapes suspended in a box with yellow and black ribbons crinkled around them. The painting is full of small illusions, the schwindeln so beloved by Albers: corners sliced into triangles suggest depth, while gradually changing colors—celadon green to white, red to purple-gray, and so on—seem to shift various forms from positive to negative space and back again.
---
Read the full review at artnews.com.
