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Patterned out of order -- By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
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| Smart, smart, smart and smart. D. Berman
Gallery makes a first -- and an impressive -- splash into the Austin art gallery pool with an
intelligent showing of four painters who prove, in different ways, that pattern and decoration can
exhilarate and intrigue. Pattern painting emerged in the 1970s as a reaction to the cerebral coolness of minimalism. Often taking their cue from non-Western art traditions, pattern painters sought to bridge the gap between folk art and high art. The four painters grouped for this show -- Danny Clayton, Marianne Green, Benito Huerta and Sydney Yeager -- all continue with the basic stylistic tenets of pattern painting, but reinvigorate it with a new level of brio. Wonderfully enigmatic and alluring, Clayton's gouache paintings combine the best of Op art styling (masses of small shapes and lines in vivid, sometimes neon colors that seem to constantly move) with elegant designs reminiscent of boudoir wallpaper or upholstery. Softly glowing, these paintings seem like strange, personal mandalas -- colorful idiosyncratic mappings of dreams. Simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive, Green's paintings feature broad views of roadside America, billboards, gas stations and fast-food places trickling along the bottom of the image underneath a big expanse of blue sky. Green then fringes the top of such an image with a decorative pattern in a swirling floral pattern. Other paintings surround the same roadside landscape with a thick border of rich and lurid trompe l'oeil brocade. Green's work strikes a nice chord between the ridiculous and the sublime, the real and the faux. The Austin-based Yeager surprises with a reinvigorated take on her expressive abstract paintings. Knotted, lumpy sweeps of oil paint in saturated color form the background over which float linear forms and calligraphic marks -- the repeated shapes are all subtly, and fetchingly, out of focus. Occasionally, Yeager dots the canvas with gold leaf. The rich texture of the thick vigorously applied paint combined with Yeager's intense hues make for compelling and beguiling paintings. Finally Huerta creates visual layers that seem to disappear and reappear in the course of viewing. He mixes both abstract shapes and lines with some identifiable images -- in the large-scale "Temporary Like Achilles" the background seems to be a map of an unidentifiable continent on top of which are intensely woven lines and shapes. On the edge, Huerta adds a linear color key as if to offer some sort of ballast to the great swirl of color, line and form -- a nice play between chaos and order. Yes, chaos and order -- and familiar and strange, elegant and wry. In the end, these four painters offer a fresh take on the sententious tradition of pattern and decoration. |
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