BAY WINDOWS February 4, 1999 (Boston)
"From Ab-Ex Onward" (unedited version)
by John Ruggieri

“Then and Now: 35th Anniversary Exhibition, Part I” @ Nielsen Gallery

“William Wood" @ Mario Diacono

The Nielsen Gallery has gathered together works of the past and present by its first generation of represented artists. This show, which spans three decades, illuminates what twelve contemporary artists have accomplished during a period of tumult and change in the art world.

Many of these painters and sculptors have taken the raw energies of the abstract expressionists and run with it in their own way and remain unapologetically painterly. Seen in this light, the delicately honed glass-plus sculptures of Christopher Wilmarth bring to mind that elusive, soft Ab-Ex-ist Rothko. The spiraling figurative forms in Wilmarth’s drawing owe more to gestural abstraction than to the minimalist aura so evident in his work of three dimensions.

Gregory Gillespie’s figurative oeuvre is here unmistakably original and yet diverse in content. He delights in mixing quirky, cheery, and intelligent color together in thin layers as he scrutinizes the rich lives of flesh, decoration, mortar, and landscape. His “Large Untitled Landscape” is a moody forest of swipes, swirls, and schmuzz of paint set against an early evening blue sky.

The lower earthy half of this painting is an alphabetical inventory of oil painting’s effects. A flock of zipping drips of red and blue gather and fall onto a winding trail of brushed flourishes of subdued green, black, and yellow. It is as if Gillespie took a beautifully fungal magic wand over the dark woods of Courbet and made them less precious, more like the flow of nature. Tiny anthropomorphic forms ooze from the mass of this imperfect Eden of painting’s surging existence.

Jake Berthot is not interested in flattering our preconceived notions of color. His palette is ground down to a haunting whisper of brittle browns, greens, grays, ochres. His forms also are not built up to offer spatial illusion but somehow hacked away by layer upon layer of paint to fall back onto the flat plane of canvas. Yet in the recent “Early Morning,” he seems to jump back into the history of landscape painting — sliding back behind the three earlier, flatter works here and ambivalently yet gallantly seeking space and atmosphere from the past.

He works brighter shocks of red, green, and orange into the geometric mix, sometimes too abruptly as in the large “Stack,” and more subtly, as in “Remenschnider’s Road.” On this “Road,” Berthot is bumping and grinding blobs and strokes of oil around a central ellipse, all set within a field of mustard. He might be saying, “TA DAH! I can slap a bit of vermilion and slather it with red, then white, but, no, I don’t want to make this a so-called focal point, I’ll add some orange and yellow splotches in the corners to make you look at, and maybe adore, this bitter mustard yellow as I do.”

John Walker’s semiabstractions are about thick oil squirted straight from the tube with decision and direction, eager and forthright and shot equally out of the artist’s body and mind. His subjects tend toward the Aboriginal, the biological, and a bit of the shapely. He seems to carve out and cover his large canvases in mere Supermanic minutes, using color fiercely and smartly. The imagery is fearsome, too. Just looking at his work makes my pen flow faster, bigger, and broader. He incites Ab-Ex art writing, a rushing to an authentic fresh impression, and, of course, a deadline.

While Walker meets the proportions of working large with full force, the small painting “Oxford Study E” has a vibrant energy yet seems squashed, closed in, a booming voice caught in a telephone booth. Still, the big subject of this piece seems to signal the raging storm of American abstraction charging into a previously calm sea outside a Matissean window.

Within the row of modestly sized Bill Jensen oils lining one wall lie some jewels of painting’s possibility. He paints with a quiet pleasure, splicing a variety of temperaments and surfaces with an all-in-one spirit. Here canvas texture beckons through layers of scraping and dulling of blue and ochre, there velvety brown scumbles slide over a hushed shape of snowy white.

Another painter intent on using variety is Joan Snyder, whose long career is represented here in both pure and collaged painting. The recent and largest work, “I Am Not the Same Person,” is a good example of her primal language, with its requisite slinging and fingering of campy greens, oranges, reds, yellows, and blues. These clumpings of natural life float around two pieces of adhered canvas covered in white, cream, and mauve rectangles. This is an ode to process, playing hide-and-seek around the idea of modernist structure. But I love Snyder’s work when she is more decisive about space and makes more elegant, less literal statements with color, as in a monotype series of abstract landscapes she made a few years ago in Provincetown at a time of personal tragedy. She is not the same person but an artist continually taking risks in form and content, always imbuing her work with a robust subjective passion.

Other highlights here include a room of Harvey Quaytman shuffles among powder pigments, minimalist gridlings, and bawdy hues. He is sharp with color, pressing squares of romantic rose pink behind other squares of frozen white, all edging the central cross of finely combed rust. A star of the show for me is the huge canvas “Kingston,” which weaves an electric, iridescent blue/purple side-to-side in a vast field of thickly stroked wet and dry pigment.

Paul Rotterdam’s suite of paintings on wood (“Blenheim 35,” “Blenheim 34,” “Friedrich I”) use the outer frame and the inner niche of an overused painting device — looking out a window — and makes simple and strategically gorgeous exhalations about landscape. He begins with a tight palette of smokey blue, yellow, green, and black and makes wide washy grounds, then mixes the major color into other patches, riding up, within, and around the slatted frame with a cohesion and subtlety not often witnessed.

Do go and see the paintings of William Wood for yourself. In this finely edited show at Mario Diacono’s sublime gallery space near South Station, one large and four midsize oils on canvas invite entrance into abstract worlds of curving and caving natural form. He whips and whittles paint into a mystery pudding of melted light and shadow in milky cool white, metal gray, and deep black.

Like the more colorbound paintings of David Reed, Wood’s work deserves the appellation “important,” delicately attached to our detached times and also caressing the past of more traditional (perhaps Baroque) styles. The light portrayed here is not of an old, fuzzy time longed for in the past but a photographic light in gradient ebb and flow in an ultra-cool virtual void. The two works here structured by a strong horizon line of blending, bleeding white light refer more directly to photography’s conventions, both edged on the sides by a dark ridge reminiscent of a Polaroid or squeegeed silk-screen print. Wood makes highly refined echo chambers of pleasure-seeking striated movement, rippling sensually in soundless light.

Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved.