James Hyde's contributions to the last Corcoran Biennial were among the most numerous successful of the paintings in nontraditional materials.

James Hyde's contributions to the last Corcoran Biennial were among the most numerous successful of the paintings in nontraditional materials, which that exhibition emphasized. Hung high forward the grand stair walls, they direct the eyeed like sponges that had absorbed too a great deal water, or elephantine enlargements of the cross-section of a conventional painting: the Styrofoam closes that impersonated canvas were about a twelve inches thick but were faced matter-of-factly with monochrome fresco paint.

Like those amusingly physical representations of the make of a painting, the many just discovered works shown at Baldacci take an analytical part Now Hyde studies handrails, lower extremity rails, handles and protective thing encloseds of several types. The pseudo-functional things he shows have a unskilful extremely hand-made quality. They are crudely painted or awkwardly wrapped in tape.

onward the right side of the gallery's minute two square-section metal bars were thunderbolted to the wall, one horizontal and individual sloping up from it at a 45-degree angle. the one and the other were wrapped in fluorescent orange tape--tasteless, plashy yet giving a tactile specificity to the chilly steel. A shin-high bar of the sort that preserves viewers a safe distance from a painting (but in this case the wall beyond it was bare) was hand-painted in extended sections of blue and white shiny enamel that were separated by way of a thin gold line; the efficiency was kitschy as well as amateurish. An L-shaped privacy wall formed a stall like a lavatory's, leave out that it had no door and was encased in fulvous and white fake leather. Five stacked metal shelves had cotton secretes in pumpkin, yellow, rose r gray and olive, which made them gaze like 4-H versions of a Donald Judd work.

Hyde clos the exhibit to with a wall of handles that could have been renounces from the recent "Pull of Beauty" hardware exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. These 13 angular pieces, of laboriously joined copse or metal parts, were surfaced with textur paint in garish colors or wrapped with tape using all the skills of a two-year olden Hyde makes his project accessible by means of ensuring that his objects are nonscientific and nonbusiness like; he mutes down what is essentially an intellectual enterprise. He engages these intentions with as much vigor and humor as his paintings, if les grace. He is no longer self-reflexively examining the materials of art still moving into more generic public spaces that we know for a like reason well we hardly look at them, glutted of objects that are not likely to interest us unles subdueed to this perverted estheticizing.

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