The exhibition pamphlet for “Angelo Ippolito: A Selection of Paintings and
Works on Paper”
states that Ippolito’s subject
is “light,” which may be true, but his is a light unlike any seen in the
natural world. His colors are far more iridescent—almost Day-Glo—than those
produced by the sun. Born in Italy, Ippolito has lived and worked in upstate
New York for more than twenty-
five years, painting landscape-derived
abstractions, which recall Hans Hofmann’s pulsating canvases.
In the best paintings on display here—
generally the large oils—Ippolito
achieves a brazen luminosity, with rectilinear shapes and brushstrokes
emerging from expanses of bright colors. Of course, in abstractions such as
these, composition weighs equally with color in the success of the work. A
large field of fluorescent orange on which geometric marks in a number of
colors
—magenta, purple, red—appear, Kusadasi Bazaar (1991) holds most of its
pictorial activity in the center of the canvas, with brushed rectangles of
color orbiting the central conglomeration of shapes. In Cape
Sunium
(1992), Ippolito painted rectangular and triangular whites, yellows, blacks,
and blues high on the central axis of a light fluorescent green and yellow
canvas. What seems to work less well is the muddy diffusion of marks
in Alto
Adige (1994),
the largest work in the show. In this painting of whites,
magentas, and grays, paint
marks, or traces, were made with a roller or
sponge. The work lacks the formal tension and weight provided by
defined shapes, while the sponged or rolled