Reviews / The New York Times

January 1984

Grace Glueck

Ronald Markman’s sprightly domestic scenes, wall pieces built up of painted wood cutouts, show he’s paid close attention to comic strips, and also to the early works of Picasso and Braque. In lesser hands, the combination might not work, but—wildly mixing colors, scales, textures, dimensions, perspectives, illusion and reality—he brings it off with verve. Puns abound. In “Still Life With Letters,” for instance, a round table, seen in flat perspective, bears, partly cantilevered off its edge, an open book, a cup of coffee, a crossword puzzle, a patchwork of fabrics, a cactus plant and some airmail letters, all in 2-D, and a round red dimensional wooden apple, the whole superimposed on the small cut-out figures of a very trendy man and woman. A real pencil lies on the table, along with a few dimensional alphabet letters and a cut-out head of Romaine lettuce (get it?)