Play Stations
The element of play in art-making is often undervalued. Older than culture, play is filled with significant ritual and meaningful gestures — components associated with art. Watching squirrels race or puppies in mock battle is a good introduction to the primordial quality of play. And the double exhibition currently on view at Pavel Zoubok Gallery is a rambunctious lesson in the art of it.
A suite of collages and assemblages by Robert Warner is felicitously paired with Mac Premo's "my systems are in your hands." Both are offbeat heirs of Joseph Cornell; both are sophisticated and fastidious craftsmen, a factor that separates them from what could be called contemporary folk art. Together, they represent the zanier end of the collage spectrum.
Mr. Premo is a collagist, animator, illustrator, painter, carpenter, and commercial director whose stated goal is "to make good stuffs and eat well." I do not know what he has for dinner, but he is a grand stuff-maker.
Homo ludens — "man the player" — is boisterously alive in Mr. Premo's posture as a doyen of Systems Theory. Despite the work's organizing conceit, his meticulously crafted "systems" are fabricated for sheer pleasure. The artist is having a good time, and you should, too.
Skip the video installation, a predictable accessory to the conceptual pose, and head for the carpentry. These constructions are less a journey into the realm of systems than an elegant frolic through parquetry, precision inlay, appliqué, found objects, and a universe of witty patterning techniques for surface embellishment.
Each inventive shape suggests an object that never was but should have been. The pieces are plausible enough to seduce you into conjuring a real-world analogy for them. Part of a hurdy-gurdy or casing for a ship's compass? A wind-up music box? Maybe a concertina frame?
Some pull stunts in an attempt to justify themselves as systems. One lets you look through a periscope. Another conceals a pencil sharpener within a cabinet that holds pencils and pads for leaving notes.
Mr. Warner, a former optician, has a love affair with lenses. His series of collages and constructions, "Return to Angelica," combines optical lenses with drawer pulls, prisms, vintage book covers, chandelier crystals, and ephemera to evoke Angelica, the rural upstate town where he grew up. As a master printer of Bowne & Co., Stationers, in South Street Seaport, Mr. Warner draws on an enviable archive of 19th-century typographical source material to place under lenses. His whimsy and boxed structures are reminiscent of Varujan Boghosian. While he sidesteps the surreal, he invests nostalgia with a fragile charm that makes us ache for those old Sunday comics and ephemeral relics we discard without a thought.
This is each artist's first exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, and a winning debut for both.
Until February 9 (533 W. 23rd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-675-7490).
