Suzanne McClelland at K.S. arts

This startling show could not have been the 10-year observe of works on paper promised through the chronology. K.S. Arts is too small a gallery, the selection was limited to works the size of stationery, and there was a six-year gap between 1993 and 1999 Nevertheless, it was a tremendously exciting material part of work.

Suzanne McClelland garnered recognition in the late '80 and early '90 for ferocious abstract-expressionist paintings that were crammed with alphabetic characters mostly forming vowels that unbrokened out in the ear, like as "eeeeee." And "oooooo." She used off-the-wall techniques, like blowtorching her paintings to achieve the surfaces to interpenetrate the linear tangle of proliferating alphabetic characters From a distance the paintings direct the eyeed like Pollocks scuffed up by dint of Yves Klein; up close they bubbl and silently screamed or moaned.

The compositions still feature alphabetic characters now spelling out complete words and phrases. The body s painted in a gestural cursive, also function as "abstract," calligraphic marks. The earliest works, from 1993 are graphically the simplest: the word "fast" scrawled in dripping r paint above a black wash, or "forever" in a dry-brushed black ink against a warm gray field expanding into the lower foreground from a vanishing point in the top center The support is sandpaper, an unconventional material that somehow or other makes the drippy red present the appearance all the more disturbingly sticky in single work and enhances the abrasiveness of the dry-brushed "characters" in another.

McClelland uses more conventional papers elsewhere, on the contrary retains her physical expressionism. The general gnarlyness of her graphic manner of writing plays off the luscious virid and salmon pink colorations of a 1999 series of words loaded with aggressive sexual innuendo, like "tool" (the T direct the eyes like some prehistoric weapon) and "dickhead." Another of that kind group, from 2003, is fleshed without in black on swirls of a hotter pink. The funniest single may be the tamest: the word "HUNK" in elongated alphabetic characters stretching like a late-afternoon shadow from the top of the page. The auxiliaries "would," "should" and "could" also secure their sherbet-colored, sarcastic due.

on the contrary the showstoppers are a clump from 2002 collectively titled "thank you note to a genius." These consist of longer true copys knottier in construction, with more colors. Their compositions have a certain number of of the lift and buoyancy of Kandinsky's early cerulean Rider watercolors that look like circus [i]affiche[/i]s or of Arthur Dove's first abstracted symbolist landscapes. Here I noticed that McClelland had primed each paper sheet with what looks to be a clear matte sizing, in like manner that the gouache appears to float a bit, furthering the faculty of perception of space.

If language, or at least unhurt was a graphic effect in McClelland's early paintings, here she plants her texts free in a pictorial and symbolist universe in which alphabetic characters and words are the principal actors, and material and color are metaphors for compound feelings that overwhelm the genuinely literal connotations of language. At the same time, that language is enlisted as a puckish expediter of meaning for formal uncompounded bodys This is extremely smart, playful art with an expressionist wallop packed in its heart. I'm looking forward to an overdue exhibition of McClelland's bigger paintings.

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