Mary Hambleton at Littlejohn Contemporary

Just as each of Mary Hambleton's paintings aims to draw the viewer into shut examination of its intensely detailed surfaces, thus did this show as a whole search for to draw one into the artist's thronging, chiefly abstract visual universe of optically charged stripes, closely patterned dots and multilayered mark-making. After individual had looked at the dozen paintings and works upon paper in the front gallery--a substantial exhibit in itself--there came a next to the first gallery that was densely hung with a certain number of 30 smaller paintings. The exhibition's faculty of perception of plenitude derived not just from the large number of paintings upon view and their event-filled surfaces, on the other hand also from the fact that Hambleton frequently uses boxlike supports that allow her to work the sides as well as the foreheads of her pieces. Sometimes level the addition of four sides doesn't satisfy this voracious artist, and she places small fill ups of painted and collaged copse atop her paintings.

A profitable example is Sidelines (2000-03), a narrow, 16-inch-high, 2 1/2-inch-deep work that features a scumbl surface of striated grays and blacks upon its front plane. Demarcating the left cutting side of this plane is a vertical band of thick, multicolored dried paint, the sort of thing single might see on a studio table. If a viewer standing directly in forehead of Sidelines moves slightly to the left another ultimate part of the painting comes into view: dozens of horizontal, closely locate blue strokes against an orange surface of land on the left side of the work. The right and top sides are painted a simple bluish gray (I didn't check the bottom, on the contrary I suspect that it, too, has been painted). upon the top, Hambleton stacked more [i]or[/i] less variously colored wood blocks, individual of which featured a foliage-like accretion of verdant paint.

As well as satisfying her apparently unquenchable passion for covering flat surfaces with color, Hambleton's choice to place small polychrome statuarys on her paintings may also be a good-natured art-historical sally Since the heyday of Minimalism, working with extra-thick stretchers or boxy supports has been a standard manner for many abstract painters who call upon all sorts of theoretical notions to explain their choices "Yes," Hambleton seems to be saying, "a thick painting can be a Judd-like 'specific object' on the other hand it can also serve as a handy shelf." The playfully colored blockades can also evoke children's toys and games.

A veritable encyclopedia of abstract motifs and painterly techniques, this exhibit which was titled "Nothing through Mouth," represented five years of work. In a new in-depth interview in The Brooklyn Rail, the artist explained the title as being at one time a medical reference that relates to her ongoing battle with cancer and an artistic credo that favors retinal experience, and, indeed, each work in this enjoyably thronged show celebrated the responsiveness of the human eye

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