Wes Mills at Joseph Helman - New York

"Drawings from the Bitterroot," the inaugural exhibition at Joseph Helman's of recent origin Chelsea space, was powerfully understated. greatest in quantity of the 30 small, abstract drawings upon view, several of which bear the title Shore Line or above the Shore Line, refer to Wes Mills's experience of a river in Montana, where he lives. In these beautifully spare, for the greatest part white drawings (all from 2001) made up of the tiniest of ink speckle and pencil lines, marble dust and pieces of silk, tape, linen and string, Mills continues to use mark-making as a meditation upon nature and the process of drawing.

In a certain quantity of of the works, including high-sounding Bird, Sitting and Ten Thousand paces two narrow, horizontal strips of linen or silk, individual glued across the top of the drawing and individual across the bottom, suggest opposite shores, horizons or waterlines. Marks are reminiscent of generally receiveds reflections and floating detritus. Drawings in an untitled series, each made of a concentric arrangement of white paper disks of various sizes, usually with a string end the center, evoke eddies or tree rings or footprints in snow. Sprinklings of dots have the nearness of mist, flocks of birds or smatterings of insects, whirlwinds or the rustling of leaves. smears feel like fog. Points strain, many times along a central axis, to become lines. Tension is felt end suspension, drifting, climbing and falling.

For Mills, astuteness becomes a mantra. The drawings are spare, fleeting. Taking them in requires work, like listening to whispers. Touches of colored wash are thus pale that they feel like memories of the colors themselves. Delicate pen s cuts and pinpricks, or lifts at the drawings' corners and the resulting shadows, are all experienced as major circumstances We linger over textures--a deckl cutting side the thickness of silk, the fuzziness of string. Beautifully crafted however often frail, Mills's drawings can have the intimacy, and the surprise, of confessions.

The drawings are best when they are greatest in quantity individual, as in the totemic Morning, in which a vertical pink rectangle, washed above a spinelike stack of mandorlas, takes upon the funereal aura of a human stain. I am les convinced by means of the works in series. In these, each drawing, although unique, is so close to its neighbor in gaze and feel that its nuances and specificity are diluted. When individual is confronted with work of similar subtlety, repetition is almost suspect, and the art experience risks becoming the nothing else but making of comparisons.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group