Brian Belott 'What's Going On'
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: June 4, 2004, Friday

Kenny Schachter Contemporary
14 Charles Lane
West Village

Elif Uras
Private Collection
Kenny Schachter/Rove
132 Perry Street
West Village
Both through June 12

You can kiss Kenny Schachter goodbye, or you can just wave. Either way, when these exhibitions end next week, he will relocate his business to a new gallery at an epicenter of the London art scene: fashionable Hoxton Square. The final New York shows, both of young artists, are worth seeing, as is the gallery space on Charles Lane, designed by Vito Acconci, that will be destroyed when the building housing it is torn down. (It will be replaced by a nine-story condominium designed by Zaha Hadid; later Mr. Schachter plans to open a gallery in the building's ground floor.)

At Charles Lane, Brian Belott, a collagist, musician, sound artist and scavenger extraordinaire, is displaying his skill at painting and finding. Downstairs are cartoonishly endearing portraits of boom boxes; their graffitoid style harks back to Keith Haring but is redeemed by the wonderfully quaint medium of reverse-glass painting. Mr. Belott handles it with flair, jewel-like colors, bits of colored foil and a modicum of experimentation. (These are also evident in a small maplike collage that stands out in ''California Earthquake,'' a group show at Daniel Reich.)

Upstairs is a poignant display of family photo albums Mr. Belott found in thrift shops. He sometimes makes collages of such photographs and has also made a sound piece of messages found on the tapes of old answering machines. Here he presents the images as they were found, in frames or albums, which is both more respectful and lazier.

At Kenny Shachter/Rove on Perry Street, the paintings of Elif Uras make their solo debut and fit a little too easily into a familiar faux-naïve niche. They depict elaborate fantasy landscapes and interiors: a busy skating rink, the atrium of a big department store, a small plane flying upside down over a world of pink patchwork, and a stylish penthouse apartment whose walls are covered with paintings.

Ms. Uras paints with gleaming, stained-glass colors in an awkward, storybook/cartoon style that owes something to artists as diverse as Amy Sillman, Thomas Trosch, Dexter Dalwood, Dana Schutz and Hilary Knight, illustrator of Kay Thompson's ''Eloise.'' These works don't seem as promising as the small, simpler images that Ms. Uras has exhibited in recent group shows, but they definitely ante up the ambition of her art. ROBERTA SMITH

 

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