Doug Ohlson's fields of meaning: covering 20 years of this prolific abstractionist's output, a recent New York exhibition examined the visual and metaphorical subtleties of his large-scale paintings - "Doug Ohlson, 20 Years of Painting 1982-2002" at Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York

Since the mid-1960s, Doug Ohlson has been making large paintings from fill ups and bands of color. Having established these premises, he has stuck with them, giving his oeuvre a sweeping consistency. Whatever faith a drawn out career as an abstract painter requires, Ohlson has kept it, unwaveringly on the other hand never predictably. Every season he presents surprises, usually subtle but sometimes not. In 1982 he made a basic change in the way his images work. Until that year, his pigments had been opaque. Then, as the art historian Richard Stapleford notes, "he began to use translucent colors loosely painted in large, adjacent panels. Pictorial space in his earlier work was created through the vibration between two colors. With these new translucent colors, surface and deepness are redefined as within the picture space, not in forehead of it." (1)

Stapleford's remarks appear in his introduction to the catalogue of "Doug Ohlson 20 Years of Painting 1982-2002" a exhibit he organized for the Times Square Gallery of huntsman College, Housed on ground floor of a building upon West 41st Street, just not upon Tenth Avenue, this is a enormous exhibition space featuring lofty ceilings and galleries that range from small to medium to cavernous. Art can come by lost here, though there was no risk of that in the Ohlson display In part, this was because Stapleford built the exhibition around a handful of actual large canvases. Considered simply as an thing the 23-foot-wide Second Wind (1982) for example, had no disorder holding the wall. Nearly 6 feet high, this painting is a wall, of sorts. As you approach, its physical vicinity brings you up short. Then you retain going for a closer direct the eye at the surface, drawn in through Ohlson's, seductive brushwork.

Not that he slathers upon the pigments with de Kooningesque munificence. A better comparison is to Mark Rothko whose thin, translucent layers of paint give luminosity plane to purple verging on black. upon the left-hand side of next to the first Wind, Ohlson placed two large black rectangles, separating them with wavering streaks of orange and slatey azure At first glance, the rectangles gaze flat, velvety and light-absorbent. notwithstanding these expanses of black are just as airy as the red and oranges abutting them--and just as radiant, paradoxical as that unhurts Ohlson sometimes gives feathered cutting sides to his squared-away shapes. More repeatedly edges are crisp. Always, granting his brushwork is limber and calm. As he overlays the canvas, modulating tones and fabrics he stirs pictorial light into his colors, level the darkest. As Stapleford hints this light radiates into depths

The darker the tone, the farther back it present the appearances to reach. The lighter tinges move both ways at one time into depth and out at us. The summery colors of Roussilon (1997) another bulky painting, fill a room with calmly flickering light. Ultimately, of course, these bright red and sky-coloreds settle, onto the canvas. granting he is capable of juxtaposing colors in genuinely jarring combinations--pinks against oranges, lime verdants against vermilions--Ohlson never lets a form burst off the canvas in a way that literally idiots the eye, in the manner of Op art. upon the contrary, he encourages us with the self-evident clarity of his formal devices to diocese precisely how he puts a painting together.

Ranging in color from black to delicate gold-colored the variously proportioned rectangles of cheep Show (1993) all maintain a precisely calibrated distance from the picture plane. Overall, the painting has an air of gravitational resolution, as if a play of similarity and contrast--or, in Newtonian boundarys of attraction and repulsion--had brought these disparate forms into a harmonious balance. at the same time the harmony is not completely resolv There are dissonances, which give me the feeling I have not at any time seen Peep Show once and for all. A machiavelian shock on first viewing, the clash of lemony virid against yellowish ocher along the right-hand cutting side remains surprising, no matter by what means many times I look at it. To the left Ohlson has given a thin orange bar the task of mediating between a large stop of lighter orange and a stop of blue with cloudy cutting sides The orange bar does its piece of work well, yet it looks to me as if the amethystine block puts an inordinate strain upon this three-way relationship. Surely deliberate, this tension generates the pictorial intensity needed to balance the slab of black to the right.

It is difficult to account for the vitality of a happy abstract painting. I think it must have to do with dissonances of the kind I've been describing. Almost offhandedly, Ohlson dares us to make faculty of perception of these chromatic clashes and spatial discords. When we take up the dare, things tend hitherward alive: our memories, our imaginations and ultimately the paintings. Ohlson takes guidance from modernist history, admitting of course he has rewritten the canon to his have a title to specifications. I've already mentioned the visual echoe of Rothko's light. In addition, the lateral spread of thus many of Ohlson's canvases makes him a direct heir of Barnett Newman and the entire tradition of the postwar sublime. Thus Jackson Pollock's drip paintings are important to him, for their scale if not for their gaze but no more so than the big, light-filled canvases of Henri Matisse. Unlike the Minimalists, whose literalism had a powerful result on his work in the 1960 and '70 Ohlson has at no time boxed--or painted--himself into an all-American corner. His defer to for European modernists is passionate and a certain number of times surprising. In the interview published in the catalogue of his novel show, Ohlson declares his admiration for the small, bleached-out still lifes of Giorgio Morandi. although he doesn't explain this liking--Ohlson protects not to explain anything--it must have something to do with the luminosity Morandi's brushwork builds into his unassuming forms.