Overview
Nearly three decades of work are represented, demonstrating both a remarkably varied body of abstract work as well as its inherent continuity. Numerous details, immense gatefolds, and a description of La Noue's unique studio technique permit a true understanding of his beautiful and influential work.
Synopsis
Nearly three decades of work are represented, demonstrating both a remarkably varied body of abstract work as well as its inherent continuity. Numerous details, immense gatefolds, and a description of La Noue's unique studio technique permit a true understanding of his beautiful and influential work.
Publishers Weekly
La Noue, an American abstract painter, has traveled widely through Africa, Mexico, Central America, India and Nepal, assimilating the motifs and sights of diverse cultures to his highly personal vision. His dense, heavily worked canvases seem at first cacophonies of arcane symbols, with echoes of Kandinsky and Klee. However, as art critic Ashton ( Fragonard ) demonstrates in the absorbing essay, which accompanies 150 plates (132 in color), there is an internal coherence to La Noue's private universe, with its hundreds of cross-references. The painting River Styx is a dark, Dantesque mythscape whose seething shapes evoke the netherworlds of many cultures. The four panels of Extraordinary Possibilities: Harrowing Complications draw the viewer into a psychic drama that leads from chaos to wholeness. In the ravishing Benares , two mountain shapes shore up tiny blazing red triangles and halo-like arcs suggestive of painted cave walls or Tantric art. La Noue's voyage through the Jungian collective unconscious is well worth taking, yet ultimately he seems a painter's painter. (Nov.)