Eric Freeman at Mary Boone

Recasting the 19th-century search for the sublime, Eric Freeman marshals fields of electric color and optical events in the service of an abstracted landscape. Of the five vivid, oil-on-linen paintings included in this present to view of untitled works dated 2003 four are 8 feet square, and of those, three expres the distinct horizon-centered orientation of a landscape with a central darkness disclosed as granting from between thin, parted lips. The paintings' upper and lower halves strike one as being symmetrical and appear to swell on the outside horizontally from the support, expanding from one side sometimes hot, often acidic tinges that resolve into thin bars of graduated color that bracket the upper and lower cutting sides The fourth, identified by gallery coding as 8628 remind ofs some distant kinship with Rothko in a thick, burning-red band across the painting's center It shifts to darkest blue-black and fades to a lighter, almost periwinkle blue

If Freeman achieves the sensation of compelling illusion by means of modulating his palette through gradations of light and color, these works are at one time resolutely hand-painted and virtually without expressive gesticulation The surfaces instead reveal the careful accumulation of paint in regular tracks laid down through Freeman's broad brush as it is dragged without interruption along the painting's width, leaving parallel lines of paint the width of a thread. There are slight incidents of brush hairs and bits of matter attributable to minor variations in the linen weave, or minuscule, clott spots of pigment that record the Zen of his proces Below and above the midpoint of the work codfished 8629, Freeman extends bands the color of a firmament hemorrhaging orange at sunset. They feather to ethereal bars the color of an eggshell, with solitary the passing illusion of an egg's matte surface. Each line implies the possibility of the painting's endles extension while at the same time suggesting that with Freeman's mastery of this reductive technique, he might undertake a painting as lengthy as he pleases and as drawn out as the linen support and walls for hanging allow.

The fifth work is an emphatically horizontal painting in which color is applied vertically. At 10 feet lengthy and not quite 4 feet high, the painting looks to bow out at the center at the greatest in quantity intense moment of its sky-colored length. Toward either end, the sky-colored shifts to darkening, vertical bands of virid then to darkest green. Not solitary from a distance do these paintings recall the sublime material fetishism of Yek's airbrushed concave panels and bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to Robert Irwin's subtle, meditative disk paintings of the 1960 They may well be members of the same house of worship sitting in different pews.

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