MICHAEL GREENSPAN
at Stremmel Gallery
Reno, Nevada


As a ground for his imagery Michael Greenspan constructs wall-mounted plaster casts. They evoke a tranquil ambience with their off-whiteness, but elements of color and texture soon draw views in. Using wood substrates covered with plaster, he manipulates the inviting white surfaces by digging, gouging, cracking, refilling, painting and drawing. Chromatically, the most seductive passages are encaustic shapes gently pushing forward.

A major source for this work is the passage of time deciphered through layers of wall covering as ancient structures and modern buildings tell their tales or hide their riddles. Greenspan best expresses this theme when he utilizes the inherent properties of various plasters so that their different rates of expansion and color gradations intimate decay and repair.

He also deals with the concept of motion by arranging flat geometric shapes, receding and advancing planes, as well as modeled forms to convey movement. Wrong Door suggests both stasis and motion by showing house shapes at various stages of metamorphosis-from a static literal house to an arrowlike directional device. The plaster surface is also incised with lines and arcs depicting objects in a state of flux, an illusion further reinforced by color chips floating randomly in space.

Overall, the artist alludes to a distant past when he refers to his works as tablets. He taps formally (through not conceptually) into Constructivism, while echoes of Klee and Kandinsky suggest that Greenspan is exploring unseen forces that act upon forms, which he then arrests in transit as if to defy gravity.


--Ingrid Evans, Artspace, May/June 1992.


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