ART NEWS
May 2003

LYNN SAVILLE AND ANDREW MOORE
Yancey Richardson Gallery

Patience was the virtue most in evidence in this often exquisite two-person exhibition featuring the work of Lynn Saville and Andrew Moore.  Saville presented high-contrast black-and-white images of famous international locales captured at night.  In them, bright white light is ethereal and is the images’ grounding compositional element.  Moore’s meticulous C-prints, taken during a trip to Russia, are meditations on the somewhat ironic relationship of the present to the past, and of technology to nature.

The most stunning of Saville’s photographs was Statue of George M. Cohan, Times Square, New York (1997), which shows the dark silhouette of the famous song-and-dance man and playwright overlooking neon billboards.  With a big, lit-up Coca-Cola sign before Cohan’s stony likeness, one was prodded to wonder about the relative impact of individuals like Cohan, versus corporations, on the world.  Pont d’lena, Paris (1999) is an aerial view in which cars become orderly, dark rectangles contrasting with the blurry orbs of streetlamps and headlights.  It’s shot at such an angle that it seems things should be sliding off the distorted picture plane...

-- Sarah Valdez