Justin Craun at Fredricks & Freiser

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Justin Craun at Fredricks & Freiser

A talented young man who has yet to mature, one feels.

A dissatisfactory display. There is a certain amount of ingenuity of expression to Mr Craun’s work, but an amount largely annoyed by missteps: color is unscrupulous and lacking control, a tastelessness of pallette that shall not age well. Impasto is used to a fault, geometrical additions to the visual plane become excessive to the point of detritus. The apparent source for Mr Craun’s images, class photos and personal snaps, are not used to much advantage. On the bright side, the artist has an admirable control of technique, even a rigorous one, as evidenced by his (too) many gradient fields.

Mr Craun has a taste for satire, but here (as so often in painting) the result is purely simple: crazed expressions (as in Fresh, 2008, above) and the like. Moreover one laments a minimal level of readability, in the sense that the highly graphic composition of the artist’s works prevent much psychological intercourse with the viewer; instead, a kind of prosaic imagism is relied upon too greatly, to uncertain effect.

Tags: art, art review, contemporary art, Fredricks & Freiser, gallery, Justin Craun, new york