Dec. 1969 - Jan. 1970
[PICTURE]
Joe Overstreet, Chieftain, acrylic on canvas, 8' x 8'.
Joe Overstreet's first, comprehensive one man show is this season at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It is the most challenging pictorial confrontation in my recent experience. This show is a triumph!
Much of the work through aesthetic aspirations ends up with a certain academic rigidness. But Overstreet, along with all other major painters, is exploring painting as a first-order activity. He is unique in that with all the rhetoric, his efforts in breadth and detail provides us with an unusual and bold understanding. Color resonance for emotion, shape for edgy understanding of protection. Space for essential change. The wall is not dealt with formally, but with utter distrust: first tentatively. Formal [western] geometry plays an ever increasing part in Overstreet's work. The most distinguished is Tribal Chieftain which looks like a big kite. Four equi-v's isosceles triangles - juxtaposed to assymetrical triangles are constructed freehand; they rotate in a circular motion, becoming the straight-lined edges of this shaped canvas. They ripple over and under, now concave, now convex, leaving slightly optical rectangles partly through the choice of color [these areas are painted red and black] but very much through their irregular freehand placing. The whole primary structure and primary color field oscillates between the complementaries - yellow/blue, red/green - setting up a resonance lateritious in content and firm in delivery. All of these elements tend to aid the lucre of visual knowledge, the illusion of a stuttered, vibrant, indefinite, yet unequivocal color flow.
The geometrical discontinuity and sectional structure disengage the optical flow to leave a fictile arena flat in color resonance unlike what one finds in large, single color field paintings, like Rothko's where the subtle changes billow like a heart pumping warm blood. "All pervading, as if internalized [is the] sensation of dominant color..." is an observation made by Professor Myer Shapiro. Mr. Overstreet has managed to hold down this busy flutter - the seen image - by a process, in the studio, of heightening and slackening to give full vent to a personal morphology. He tightens up the painted surface as a whole to prevent complementary color from interfering with the sinuosity of an open, accomodating, spatial illusion. This space integrity is countenanced by the almost compulsive maintenance of a map-structured African experience. The almost abstract [in a western sense] structures of shields and other African utility are designs which preoccupy Mr. Overstreet; but he is not involved with them in any but an anterior frontal sense, once removed from the spiritual fatherland.
He-She , a work of two six-sided figures strutted together, is built up from a beginning base of two casually constructed rectangles shifting left to right, right to left - dominant red into orange, yellow into green. It reaches out somewhere to the borders of being the completely successful pictorial statement. All in all one can choose any of the paintings, even the ones that failed, to demonstrate the arrival of a truly striking new talent on the scene. [ Studio Museum in Harlem, Oct. 26 - Nov.23]--F.B.