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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January 5 – February 2, 2002

A fat graphite figure slops out of a multi-colored disc in David Dupuis’s “Love Connection” at Derek Eller Gallery, licking the edge of the twin disc on the opposite panel of the diptych; the color wheel has got its tongue. Or phallus, which suggests that if color could talk, it would talk about sex. Language often appears to be rising (or falling) out of the surfaces in this remarkable group show, rising and receding, changing form, just eluding one’s grasp, as it were. Biomorphic shapes drift over colored-pencil wave-patterns in two other compositions by Dupuis. Abstract shapes within thought or dialogue balloons of cartoon illustration imply that something is being expressed under the pleasant glow of amorphous suns hovering nearby. The allusions to thought and talk tease us out of the merely decorative without resolving into reference or abstraction. The general effect is a trippy isolation, the odd creatures of another world viewed through sealed glass. Even in those works in which the figures are somewhat more accessible there is a sense of pre-verbal yearning, of significance pushing up from the surface.

In Nina Bavasso’s “Suzanne’s Burial Mound,” [see cover] flower shapes and quilt patterns in pinks and lavenders weave through the geometric lines. The composition, breast-like, mound-like, pillow-like, forms into something at once comforting and restless, improvising on feminine motifs while allowing the momentum of repetitive pattern to inscribe the surface with an intensity of gesture. Bavasso’s elaboration of simple, freely drawn shapes has been compared to doodling, but, as is the case with Dupuis’s work, the building up of irregular forms into an off-balance mass suggests something more complicated and ambitious than that. Her images get at a merging of biology and signifying system, of vital energy and consciousness, as if the unwieldy cell structures she draws were tottering into nostalgia or whimsy.

Andrew Masullo’s three-dimensional paintings introduce a brightly colored and palpable thingness to all this play on signifying and not signifying. He builds and shapes with paint, raising three-dimensional shapes off flat, painted grids or monochrome surfaces. Again, there are biomorphic shapes, and hints at codes and signs, as well as cheerful allusions to Pop, Minimalism and Modernist abstraction. It is difficult to say what this adds up to, or if adding up to a particular point is at issue. Masullo titles his works according to their place in his oeuvre, and by now the four digit stretch of each title has its own poignancy. In this near hermetic persistence Massullo connects, paradoxically, with Dupuis and Bovasso. That Derek Eller should bring together such particular artists, and allow their works to speak among each other without an imposed rubric, is a credit to his eye and to his critical acumen.

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