April 29 – May 28, 2005

Painting is most exciting when it engages your grey matter as much as your guts. It’s amazing that an object on a wall – little more than a poster really – can get a mature adult’s mind racing and body trembling. At Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, five artists trace the line linking mind and body in a group exhibition called Art on the Line. Together they illustrate a continuum between the strictly methodical and the largely improvisational use of line in painting. The exhibition’s linear logic intelligently mirrors the structure of the paintings themselves.

Over on the left-brain side is John Warren. His drawings, graphite on paper, suggest an interest in physics. One drawing, Billow, describes the movement of a single line between moving poles crating a butterfly effect. In quantum mechanics, a single point in space is impossible to locate definitively despite the fact that the trace of that point is forever suggesting the point’s existence. So it is with Warren . His drawings chart motion without revealing what moves.

One step left of John Warren in brain logic is Nick Knight. Knight makes theory of Warren ‘s hypothesis in an oil on panel entitled Taxonome IV. Taxonomy is the science of classification and Knight’s painting is strictly classifiable only as itself. In an accompanying drawing, Knight sets the equation for his painting’s algorithm determining which lines will move which way right down to color coding. Knight’s delicate oil line is thin enough and controlled enough to frustrate but his dexterous handling liberates instead.

Back toward center away from the analytical left is John Cox. Cox suggests motion rather than charting it. His paintings are impressionistic. This might sound perverse given their appearance but in the company of Warren and Knight, that’s how they look. Cox striates his acrylic surfaces vertically and pulls color along them in bands. This creates a strong sense of movement, as with Warren , but seems to represent only a small part of a larger movement intuited. Cox’s paintings feel gleaned in the sense that impressionists gleaned their compositions from the fleeting effects of natural light. Impressionists were caricatured in their day as overly analytical for their “scientific” approach to painting. How things have changed.

The right-brainers of this bunch are Mike Miga and Elia Bettaglio. Miga is closer to center, but far from his above mentioned colleagues for two reasons: he hints at line’s potential for illusionistic description and he allows chance products of his process to determine his imagery. In El Protegido, he struck his fragile encaustic panel and used the cracks as a point of departure for the composition. The result is a web of thin lines, some fissured, some raised, which begins to hint at the emergence of discrete relational forms. This is a development none of the other painters in this somewhat austere show permit themselves with the outstanding exception of Elia Bettaglio.

Bettaglio is the deviant of the bunch. In his triptych of ink drawings, Bettaglio encourages line to define form not contingent on the nature of line itself. For his pals in the show, line is largely used to explore concepts. Bettaglio uses line, in the sense that Matta or Gorky used line, in service of his imagination. Mechanical mages materialize in little interconnected colonies set off expertly against the white of the page. Escalators are incorporated into his stingy world alongside faces and trees. It seems literally twisted, an image of a three dimensional space wound round itself. Bettaglio offers a hypothetical vision of Warren ‘s algorithm, a possible world emergent from the movements of an arbitrarily defined equation and an excellent bookend to the show.

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19 November – 19 December 2004

In an exhibition entitled “quanta,” at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Linda Francis shows paintings and drawings that draw on physics to premise patterns for the development of form in nature. Her work extrapolates form from a grid of hexagonally packed circles. In doing so it plays on the pictorial boundary between two and three dimensions.

The paintings are restrained but not dry. Their surfaces are broadly brushed in paint fat with oil. Their smoothness is not a fetish, but a condition of the paint and the board which it covers. What forms occupy these surfaces are painted generously and persuasively. The artist’s strenuously controlled contour and line is clearly a product of focus, not technical aids. This lends a warmth to the cerebral content of her work, linking the mind and the body in a way only painting can.

On first perusal of the show, it is difficult to avoid focusing on “The Square and the Tortoise.” In a show dominated by works in shades of grey, “The Square and the Tortoise” is cadmium red. At 72 x 72 inches , it dominates the rear wall of the gallery’s longest wing. Four interlacing circles traced in white occupy its upper right. A second set of four, twice the size and more tightly interlaced, overlaps it. A third set fills the picture plane enclosing a final, centered circle representing the unified set. The circles form a web of white lines of equal width that keeps the eye moving ceaselessly on the painting’s surface. The overlap of the circles simultaneously suggests their movement in three dimensions.

Francis’s drawings seem to underpin the thinking in her large paintings. She gives volume to her circular grids by rendering and erasing line after line of black chalk over their surfaces. In one small untitled drawing, she allows the negative space between lines to produce floating, two dimensional forms.  In another drawing, entitled  “Twist,” (1997), a set of lines detaches itself from the grid to form a floating double helix that might be seen as a measure of the scope Francis envisions for her work. The drawing’s logic, as I see it, goes like this: the circle’s continuous, two-dimensional space implies the three-dimensionality of the sphere from which we might derive the plurality of matter’s forms. By allowing the double helix to take such prominent place in a large drawing, Francis seems to invite her viewers to consider her grids as visual proxies for the building blocks of life itself.

The spatial tension in these paintings has its parallel in physics. Through physics, we now understand that space is not continuous but curved back on itself, contained like an object. We know that it has a presence in the form of energy which is composed of particles. Space, then, has a nature more akin to that of matter than to the absence thereof. Truly empty space, we learn, is hard to find. The confounding of two and three-dimensionality in Francis’s painting suggests their intimate link. Just as physics teaches us that a concept of space devoid of matter is misleading, so Francis’s art points out that, at the root of the theoretically flat, one might locate the volumetric.

One large painting, “Fours,” (2004) suggests an antecedent to Francis’s concept of an art based in physics in the work of her former teacher, Tony Smith. The piece’s composition is imposing. On a tall rectangle, circles overlap in shades of gray, the center of one congruent with the space between the four behind. The circles’ boundaries are distinct at times, obscured at others. Over these stacked orbs, in a thin line of yellow, Francis picks out two sets of four. The groupings’ shapes unavoidably call to mind Smith’s series The Louisenberg.

“The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills ,the shape of the clouds, all are so many riddles of morphology,” writes D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson in “On Growth and Form.” Tony Smith is known to have studied and admired this book. Its influence can be seen to shape the thought behind his late sculpture in which simple geometric forms, repeated in space, are often made to evoke natural phenomena. Such logic is present in Francis’s work. She contrives to do in painting, what Smith could only accomplish through sculpture: to break free of two-dimensional constraints without violating her medium. In doing so, she excavates the structures behind nature’s strangest forms.

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In his show “From Brooklyn With Love,” Jonas Mekas exhibits films and stills in which the world is recorded without innuendo or guile. As in all his work known to me, Mekas’ companions and surroundings reveal themselves as one assumes they were encountered – without indication of what might come next. There’s no narrative to his work, unless it be his life’s narrative, no hierarchy of events. There are no characters but those who chance before his camera. There is only sight – Mekas’ own and ours as long as we tally before Sideshow’s monitors.

Perhaps it is this uncanny ability to suspend judgement in favor of seeing that has allowed Mekas to support so many artists whose work differs from his own. He did so as editor of “Film Culture,” as a columnist at the Voice and as founder of Anthology Film. He continues this legacy at Sideshow by selecting two promising young film makers to exhibit with him: Martha Colburn and Auguste Varkalis. Both artists exhibit a-temporal work at sideshow alongside their films. Colburn shows two back-lit, computer-altered collages whose subject matter derives from her films. Varkalis shows boxed objects reminiscent of Cornell, as well as some of his illustrations from Mekas’ diary of dreams. As with Mekas, though, it is their films that impress most.

Colburn’s and Varkalis’ films both reveal the influence of Stan Brakhage, a pioneer of experimental film and yet another artist to benefit from Mekas’ support. This, however, is where their similarities end. Varkalis’ films evoke meditative calm while those of Colburn display an eye-opening corporeality.

The latter’s work is a rush of violent, sexual imagery – not repellant, but captivating. There is a necessity to her images; they seem cathartic with a frenzied quality derived from the artist’s drawing directly on the film as Brakhage did. In “Spiders in Love,” Colburn knits images of spiders with women’s faces and silhouetted phalluses. Bright colors clash with Colburn’s own discordant score. Still more savage and strange is “Skelkhelovision,” which begins with a cartoon skeleton making love to a woman, amidst hallucinogenic patterns. Similar images of coupling women and solitary nudes succeed one another. Over each Colburn scribbles her skeletons, their bones overlaying the women’s nude limbs. To my eyes, the whole equates death with sexuality in terms both ghastly and honest.

Varkalis’ films are less aggressive and more abstract than Colburn’s. They contain references to direct observation as in “The B Train” in which the periodicity of abstract flashes on a black screen mimics the lights flashing by the windows of a speeding subway car. Varkalis’ primary concern, however, seems to be the effects of various patterns and film speeds on the viewer’s nervous system. At times he seems just as willing to unnerve as to calm. He sets color against black and white, isolated form against undifferentiated fields. Unlike the intensely expressive Colburn, there is always a sense of balance in his films.

Both these artists provide definite counterpoints to Mekas’ own work in that they have visions, albeit divergent, that they seek to unfold in film. Visionary work seems to be just what Mekas avoids, pursuing instead the real, the seen-as-it-is. In Sideshows’s front room runs recently edited film footage of Williamsburg in the 50’s taken when Mekas first arrived there. The images are unprepossessing: children playing, men smoking, women chatting. It is impossible to resist the air of nostalgia they exude. Stills from the film flank the TV monitor. Next on the reel comes “Places I’ve Lived,” a set of images revisiting Mekas’ old homes one of which is a pile of rubble outside which the artist stands apparently forlorn.

In Sideshow’s rear room is one of Mekas long term projects: a film equal in length and quality to a day lived. On twelve monitors spaced round the room run Mekas’ intimate images of daily life, two hours to a monitor. Gradually, as one moves from monitor to monitor, one begins to feel at home. These anonymous faces and places were the stuff of Jonas Mekas’ most intimate life. Among them, unlike other documentary work of this nature, one does not feel oneself an intruder.

I would say that time is Mekas’ subject. Not time in the absolute sense of Warhol’s relentless films, but lived time as experienced by each of us each day. To record this, it seems, has been his lot and his goal.

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September 17 – October 24, 2005

Art belongs to everyone. So Chris Martin has it at his current show at Sideshow. Or should I say around Sideshow.  The first thing one notices on the approach is one of Martin’s signature abstractions looming large in black and red on the gallery’s adjacent brick wall. Closer still, one sees the façade of the building opposite peppered with Martin’s work. It seems perfectly at home framed by boarded windows and a wrought iron fire escape. After that, it comes as no surprise to enter Spoonbill bookshop down the street and run smack into another Martin installed between bookshelves for the occasion. He leaves his work out there, vulnerable as could be, as seemingly unconcerned about a drawing exposed to the elements as about careless passers-by and their fast fingers. Martin’s message is clear: art is meant for the streets and its inhabitants. It’s not a commercial object, but a most intimate effort at communication aimed at the broadest possible audience.

Intimacy on a grand scale – it sounds like a contradiction in terms. Mark Rothko was a master of it. He had an ability to infuse giant swaths of canvas with the most delicate feeling. It’s this that has drawn so many to his canvases over the years. In Sideshow’s front room, Martin shows himself in some measure possessed of this quality prominent in Rothko and present throughout the New York School. The one huge painting in the room is not intimidating but inviting. At 10 by 23 feet, its forms are generously hewn in black and white. They stretch with the painting’s length – lozenges punctuated by dots at three foot intervals and rectangles supporting and enclosing the lozenges. The seams of Martin’s signature drop cloth canvas contribute to the composition beneath the cake of paint. Across the room there’s a plush armchair and couch inviting the weary viewer to rest while they look. Judging by the fractious energy with which each inch of this mammoth painting is cut, Martin himself has rested little.

The painting is of a simplicity that often provokes those unfamiliar with art to balk though even the uninitiated must recognize that, by virtue of his sheer ambition, Martin is in earnest. Abstraction is a form often noted for its impenetrability. People wonder why artists would make things so hard to understand. From the painter’s perspective, it’s the other way around – their painting is clarity itself; a means by which the world is brought into focus. Martin’s forms have the feel of condensed experience, the mystical clairvoyance of things seen in great breadth and reduced to comprehensible order.

Martin appears to have installed a good portion of his studio in Sideshow’s rear room. Beside magazine clippings, old photographs, and student drawings hangs work by many of today’s finest painters. The artist is giving us his history. Three painters I imagine he’d have there if he could are Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock and Forest Bess. Though their scale is Martin’s obverse, these painters make similar use of focused form to transcribe experience. Their painting reveals how distortion of observed form is sometimes essential to fully communicate one’s feeling before nature. Martin is only a small step further toward abstraction, a step akin to that taken by the New York school more than half a century ago. His staunch determination that his paintings be seen as a part of the world that is their subject is a stance I imagine this latter group would admire.

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June 3 – July 23, 2004

The extraordinary thing about Andrew Masullo’s current show at Washburn is its variety. In a period in which painters are constantly categorized as abstract or representational, geometric or organic, hard edge or painterly, Andrew Masullo exhibits a group of recent paintings which refuse to be categorically any of these. His paintings are correspondingly uneven, yet compensate the viewer with their audacity, exuberance and inventiveness.

There are patterns to this inventiveness. Masullo’s color choices remain pretty constant often relying on bold reds and straight whites as ground. Against these he works in a regular set of yellows, blues, greens and hues. The paintings’ surfaces are heavily textured. This is one of the mysteries of the work, for the texture almost never corresponds to the image, the form of which resides in the thin skein of paint that is the paintings uppermost layer. There, strange blobs that call to mind bowling pins and baby rattles share space with a more classical geometry. The forms often flirt with figuration. In two cases, the artist goes so far as to add tiny arms and legs to his geometry, a distressing decision the only merit of which is perhaps its flagrant willingness to attempt something different. Otherwise, these tiny appendages distract.

The strongest paintings in the show are both direct and poetic. “4099” and “4085” are two. Their number titles, like all those in the show, are another of Masullo’s mysteries. In “4099,” colored diamonds and squares hang in red space anchored by a dark diamond in the upper right. In “4085,” spindly globular forms in pink, yellow, orange, black and blue echo one another diagonally across the painting’s surface. These forms look like balloon animals, a fitting association given the carnival mood of all Masullo’s coloring. In both paintings, the artist exhibits a gift for easy and adept placement of forms.

Packed end to end in one small room of Washburn’s three, the strong paintings share cramped wall space with the weak such as “4100,” in which multicolored cloud forms feel not adeptly placed but thoughtlessly crammed together. There is no relationship of form to ground in this painting as no ground is visible. Neither is there a change in scale. There is just the one form, repeated to fill the picture plane. Across the way hangs “4073.” It is quite clearly a big black Christmas tree ornament with little red arms and legs. It is set on a diagonal against its white ground and its presence in the show is a nuisance.

For all its unevenness, and in part because of it, Masullo’s recent paintings are aggressively engaging. This is a seductive quality for the viewer and an effective one for the artist. Whatever he might lose due to a poor decision, Masullo regains in his willingness to take a risk. Such carelessness as the artist shows seems requisite to the inventiveness that is his strength.

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Robert Sussman’s show at Cue Art Foundation breathes the same Chelsea air as that of his esteemed predecessor Willem de Kooning at Gagosian. I visited the latter just before the former. Unfair perhaps, comparing the two seems nonetheless profitable; viewing Sussman next to De Kooning allows one to see more clearly the contemporary twists in Sussman’s content. The comparison is also fitting because Sussman cites the Abstract Expressionists as his primary influence claiming, like those artists, to “favor experience over conceptualization.” This chunk of the artist’s statement, surely apt as far as the abstract expressionists are concerned seems less well suited to Sussman’s paintings.

Sussman, like his exhibition’s curator, Thomas Nozkowski, favors small paintings. This small scale lends itself to a more retiring contemplation of the art than the Abstract Expressionists tended to provide. Prompted by the artist’s focus on certain forms, I find myself viewing his paintings as one might a puzzle, dissecting them for intersecting meanings. The calligraphic curly-cue, reminiscent of cartooning, repeats itself throughout the paintings on display at Cue, as does Sussman’s use of rectilinear constructs of solids and voids. He plays washy trapezoids against hazy yet colorful grounds. He has a tendency to centralize his compositions like icons while his employ of the diptych consistently emphasizes horizontality. The paintings seem schematized at times. Take, for example, untitled #2, in which the right hand panel is a stark black that severs the landscape-like composition on the left. Such a black in such a context does not seem experiential. It seems instead to derive from some concept of experience as interrupted or fragmented. Much of Sussman’s color functions as does this black.

De Kooning always uses naturalistic color grounded in sensory experience no matter how intense the hue. His paintings from the 60’s and 70’s are relentlessly atmospheric – color speaks always of observed phenomena. Brushstrokes swim outward, suggesting space far beyond that contained by the picture plane. These paintings do not repeat form with the exception of the brushstroke itself, the lowest common denominator of content in de Kooning’s work.

Sussman might find a more apt lineage in other abstract expressionists, such as Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still, whose insistence on certain compositional devices mirrors more closely his own. Yet both of these artists use scale to force viewers into awareness of themselves bodily in relationship to the paintings. To look at their larger paintings, one must literally pace the length of the room, close to see the surface, far to contemplate the whole. You’re meant to lose yourself in the abstract expressionist’s colors, to have an experience of your own. Before a Sussman, one stands at several paces, physically tranquil. It’s the mind and the eye that do the work. Sussman’s easy, inventive way with paint appears driven by a far more cerebral core than the artist is willing to admit. Rather than favoring experience over concept, Sussman’s lush and intellectual paintings reveal the pitfall’s of such dichotomies.

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closes April 15, 2004

Ann Craven’s paintings at Gasser and Grunert are confounding. In terms of subject matter, they couldn’t be more straightforward – deer in fields and birds on branches. One painting, one animal for the most part, all painted on monumental scale in saccharine colors. What makes them confounding, is that they are intentionally formulaic. If you know your next painting will look just like your last one, why paint it?

Craven’s finely honed style draws heavily on contemporary German painting, particularly the work of its foremost representative, Gerhard Richter. Craven wipes her backgrounds, and allows her brushwork to show in the painting of the animals. Blemish free background, visible mark in the fore, just like a Richter abstraction. Unlike Richter, however, Craven is not interested in deconstructing how a painting is made. Instead, like Jeff Koons, Craven focuses on the mechanism of mechanical reproduction and its relationship to superficial beauty, i.e. kitsch. Or so it seems, judging from the fact that she literally paints the same painting multiple times as in “Deer” and “Deer in Daises” in Gasser and Grunert’s first small room, and “Hello, Hello, Hello” in the rear.

The latter painting, a monumental triptych, illustrates most clearly the conundrum of Craven’s work. The three long vertical panels repeat the image of a red-tailed gray parrot stretching its wings urgently. On the gray ground behind it, beautifully painted, hang purple flowers. The painting of the bird is lustrous, wet in wet scalloping feathers building to the orange eye of the sideways parrot glance. The handling here seems impassioned yet we know it can’t be because it’s copied as conscientiously as possible in each painting. Passion in painting has to do with inspired risk and invention. A painter intent on such passion seeks not simply to make a painting but to have an original experience in the making of it, to make a discovery. Craven gives us this kind of passion in the parrot and then throws it to the birds by repeating it in formula.

Originality, then, is not Craven’s concern. Instead, she presents a stubborn lack of it. Craven’s assembly line parrot paintings fall like the monotonous hellos of the parrot itself, all in service of a visual pun: three parrots, three hellos. Why paint then? She could easily make her point about dehumanizing mass production in another medium. Instead, she uses an inherently sensuous medium presumably to underscore her point by desensitizing it. Painting, by virtue of its uniqueness, draws attention to the lack thereof in so many human endeavors. The greater the apparent uniqueness, the keener the sense of its absence elsewhere. Like cultural theory, Craven’s work functions in the opposite sense, taking you analytically step by step along the path mass culture travels. It offers virtuosity, ambition and artifice in service of this end, but remains obstinately contradictory as painting.

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January 8-February 28, 2004

What if, with a glance, a solid could be made weightless? What if all our ideas about matter were an illusion stemming from a state of mind, which once changed, changed the physical world with it. Then we could live unconstrained by walls and distances, unencumbered by physics. Our own bodies could be light as air or quick as running water.

These were my thoughts at Washburn Gallery before the sculpture of George Sugarman, a photograph of whom adorns the wall to the left as you enter. It reveals a face as expressive and warm as Sugarman’s art. He works in cut, welded and bent aluminum never more that a quarter inch in width. To compose his work, he seems to choose a shape and repeat it, Minimalist style. But Sugarman’s sculpture lacks any sense of the modularity associated with the work of his contemporaries, Andre of Judd. Instead, form flows. Each successive aluminum part, fastened to its predecessor with rivets, seems the next moment in a continuous motion that threads a sculpture together.

In some pieces, he abandons the rivets altogether and simply bends and cuts a single piece of aluminum into a wave like form, two of which fit snugly together to make “Waltz.” One is black, the other blue. When I first saw it, I thought of the ocean crashing on rocks. I felt the movement of one thing into another. Such is the evocative potential of Sugarman’s abstraction.

My own love of landscape and natural form found easy purchase in all his work. What are you meant to see in “Orange Around” with its spiraling mass of interlocking wedges varying in shape and color? Although the piece’s internal scale is perfect, each part relating evenly to the whole, its size, waist high off the ground, seems arbitrary. Again, unlike Minimalist sculpture, Sugarman’s work does not depend on its size relative to that of the viewer for its impact. It does not bother about relationships with the gallery space but refers to some other content.

“Orange Around” seems like the moment just before or after an event. Are those yellow birds at the upper most lip of the piece’s goblet shape? Sun drenched gulls startled outward? I see the sea again. The blue and white interlocking wave wedges around the upper bowl of the form spiral downward whirlpool like toward the depths of the sculpture’s base. But what are those jagged oranges and blacks moving upward? And perhaps those are not birds at all, but the sun breaking on the clouds after a sea squall.
Physics tells us that energy is mass’ equivalent in another form, that the qualities of an object’s physical existence come down to a measure of its potential to transmit energy. It is Sugarman’s gift with material, in manipulating it, to set the mind free in pursuit of physics’ more mystical associations. In his hands, painted aluminum is not painted aluminum. It is anything but and it reveals motion, as light as air and as fluid as water.

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Good painting has a way of eluding critical explication. It is often said in critical dialogue about painting that good painting has a quality of inevitability about it. Good painting, they say, could not have been otherwise. Like all truisms, this one often comes up short faced with the painting it describes. This is the case with Cynthia Hartling’s nine small paintings at N3 Project Space in Williamsburg. Each painting feels like an interrupted moment of evolution, as though in the making, another project richer in potential stole the artist’s attention and gave the finish to the piece. They feel as though they might have been otherwise. One leaves the show grateful for these nine moments of insight into Ms. Hartling’s creative process.

“(I’m) trying to piece through something,” says Hartling of her painting. Such is the feeling evoked by her abstractions, most of which are untitled. Of the three that are, two are in Gaelic: “Teistimeireacht” and “Firinne,” testimony and truth. These two gems date from ’98 and rely on what Hartling calls a “networking of lines” for their structure. This networking resembles scaffolding in which horizontal, vertical and diagonal beams interlock to support a structure. Hartling uses her networking like a scaffold, improvising over it in form and color. In “Firinne,” pink and yellow paint descends, hot and fat, to leave chunks of alizarin networking visible beneath. A grey band of the same streaks in from bottom right. These fragments float in tenuous yet pronounced relation to each other. “Teistimeireacht” is less flamboyant in its color scheme and the networking ascends in browns to break the canvas’ upmost boundary. A narrow scrim of wavy blue and grey lines descends in the paintings center, while wet in wet red dots trail off to the right.

The linear structure of these two paintings seems to be determined by the brush and the hand. There are no traces of a straight edge. Although she loves Agnes Martin, Hartling claims to be unable to paint in her “cool” style. She’d rather try “to humanize geometric form.”

The third titled painting, “Smoke,” seems to do just that with Peter Halley’s work. “Smoke” is, by far, the simplest composition of the lot. On a green ground fat with oil, sits an off-center rectangle, pink at the border and yellow in the middle, all creamy paint. Semi circles in impasto black flip upwards off the surface. Like Halley, Hartling seems to be dealing with geometric representation of organic systems here. Where Halley is big, crisp, and cool, Hartling is quiet, intense and warm.

In “Smoke,” Hartling seems to allow the painting’s first thin coat of paint to stand. She is just as willing to layer and scrape. In some instances, she chips away at thick paint, as though with a knife, to expose dried layers below. As a result her paintings often give the impression of spiraling in on themselves revealing worlds within worlds. From a distance, one of Hartling’s forms may suggest a face or a bit of landscape, an illusion that dims as one moves toward it. Her work functions as both form and image, containing both, insisting on neither.

“I’m trying to tame the chaos,” says Hartling of her attempt to deal with geometric abstraction. Her words could easily be applied to the act of painting as a whole. Hartling’s work, like all good painting, attempts to juggle and balance disparate, often violently opposed chunks of input. Good painting strives to synthesize and may just as likely reveal complexity as simplicity. Hartling’s painting tends toward the former, complexity hard won and defiant of critical dissection.

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