His recent showing at Jung Center, "Reconstructions," combined traditional portrayals of Greco-Roman legends with abstract over-painting to create a wondrous method for showing the evolution of art, and himself, over a 30-year span.
Staley's new exhibition at Zoya Tommy Contemporary, titled "The Resolution of Doubt", is totally different, and includes a number of approaches within the same showing. His Wonderer suggests perhaps the chaos present as the physical world was formed, a vertical sliver of red controls the center, against a background of irregular blues and dark reds, while a pale green grape-shaped blob seems to have formed into something more definite. It is mysterious, and intriguing.
Resolution of Doubt, which gave the exhibition its title, has a dominant black mass at the left, perhaps a celestial orb, with a magenta comet with a pale green core hurtling toward it. A collision seems unavoidable, adding a sense of awesome expectancy.
Mystery is the most specific of the paintings, which are acrylic and collage on canvas, and seems the most cerebral, rather than emotional. Its lower section represents the ground, yellow dots on green earth, with a mottled green-gray sky overhead. Floating in the sky is a fragment of something, a figure that is irregular on the right edge, as though the fragment had been torn from a larger square. The fragment is divided into two sections, vertical, with color variations, but both are varieties of red. There is a deliberateness here that is powerful, making us wonder - this, of course, is the artist's very successful intention.
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Starts: Nov. 4. Continues through Nov. 15, 2014
