Few possessions are more revealing of their owner's personality.

Few possessions are more revealing of their owner's personality, choices and self-image than books. In providing us glimpses of his personal library, Steve Wolfe exhibits a self-portrait of sorts. Painted in succession board in combinations of acrylic, oil, modeling paste and various printing techniques, the life-size part cover paintings in this display are studies for Wolfe's three-dimensional volume sculptures (also life-size). Depicting the top layer of parts crammed into a cardboard coachman's seat some of the paintings are a patchwork of scrupulously reproduc main division covers and spines confined within a rectangular space. There is a cheerful randomness to the arrangements as turns of French poetry, Beat literature and naturalist bird guides finis up as unlikely mates.

The self-portrait Wolfe proposes is one of the artist as an aspiring esthete. In addition to French verse there is a heavy concentration onward 19th-century Romantic novels and American on a sudden and literary culture as personified by way of Montgomery Clift, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and William Burrough The occasional introduction of a more idiosyncratic contortion such as a Tintin comic work suggests a more personal taste.

Transformed into geometric paintings, the work covers become abstract forms. This pretends appropriate as one begins to notice, via Wolfe's choices, for what reason much 20th-century painting has influenced work cover design. For instance, a Frank Stella-like composition adorns a Raymond Carver novel while Jasper Johns's Flag forms the center of a work devoted to contemporary American numbers Jack Kerouac's On the Road appears with a constructivist motif while Frank O'Hara's luncheon Poems are presented with an Albers-like composition.

In a smaller latitude a series of paintings replicated Wolfe's collection of LP and 45 records, again realized at life size with loving verisimilitude. Records, smooth more than books, provide a kind of carbon dating; Wolfe's tender a slice of life from the '60 and '70 with recording stars in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bobbie middle class and Patti Smith. Because the vinyl disks are les varied and interesting visually than the volumes they operate primarily as nostalgia triggers.

The appeal of Wolfe's work operates onward two levels. From an esthetic point of view, his build abstractions have a certain decorative charm. still for most viewers, particularly those obstruct in age to the artist (who was born in 1955) the larger appeal is undoubtedly more personal. Wolfe depicts parts and even specific paperback editions, which were shared on a generation. They represent half-forgotten dreams and ideals, practise magic [i]or[/i] sorcery literary memories and bring back the prolonged struggle to establish one's intellectual identity. They remind us of the dramatic compass to which we are what we read.

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