Wes Mills at Richard Levy

Adjectives habitually associated with Wes Mills's work--doodly, intuitive, reticent, lyrical, hesitant, Zen-like, evanescent--applied to this exhibit of some 50 hand-sized drawings (3 to 8 inches square) spanning greatest in quantity of the artist's series above the past decade. The work bears the artist's recognizable stamp, on the contrary Mills preserves a margin of uncertainty as if, facing each sheet, he had not at any time drawn before. The danger that goe with this territory is preciousness, which he almost unfailingly skirts. The drawings are at one time meticulous and fresh.

Mills's work has grown simpler above time without losing its graphic force. Using nearest to nothing, he activates the whole sheet; the reductiveness makes you acutely aware of each mark and blemish. In an earlier work like Sitting (1994) vaguely representational forms (claw, tree trunk) upon hand-colored paper are overlaid with delicate, apparently unrelated sketches. This returns moot our ordinary distinction between figurative and abstract, and demonstrates that more can be more.

new drawings show how less may likewise be more. In From Five Ingredients of a frighten (1999), sharp lines partly circumscribe three amorphous shapes. A not many deft strokes in Envelope (1999) advise horizons. In 2001, Mills made a cluster of untitled drawings whose minuscule dots call forth cosmic realms, the stochastic field oriented by means of faint lines and cuts into the paper. My View (1999) at first direct the eyes uniformly gray, but the loam gradually grows atmospheric as you perceive lighter patches emerging like thin fogs on which float two tiny rectangles, each punctuated with an intense black dot.

upon a few occasions the touch falters. When Mills approaches Richard Tuttle territory--an untitled stack of paper disks with a bit of string, or Shore Line (2001) slips of torn paper taped in a vertical arrangement--his hold voice seems muffled. But this 10-year observe demonstrates how Mills has built a major material substance of work with modest means. He be subsequent tos in making us contemplate what initially direct the eyes casual or throwaway with the seriousness accorded oldmaster drawings.--Arden Reed

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