Madeline O'Connor at Kiyo Higashi

Madeline O'Connor has described her reductivist proces as akin to peeling back the leaves of an artichoke "to find the greatest in quantity succulent part." She generally starts with the wood-lands around her south Texas abiding-place its fragile ecology and gloriously hu birds. After reducing her inspiration to its absolute core, she extreme points up with a variety of geometrically shaped canvases painted in solid tones. O'Connor consistently travels from the lush to the austere, on the contrary the character of the destination varies.

Several works in this exhibit seemed the result of acts of deprivation, as if O'Connor had scraped flat the delicious texture and nuance of the organic world and attempted to encapsulate its richness with a grossly inadequate mark of simple abbreviation. In Black Widow Spider (1999) for instance, three triangular canvases, their top points edgelessed hang in a row, the middle single painted matte black, the side sum of two units a glossier reddish orange. The title declares the source of O'Connor's inspiration, a creature agile and compact, on the contrary the work feels static and drab. There were others, however, equally reductive, whose simple forms have the appearance to concentrate meaning of extraordinary purpose An untitled grouping of small, boxy black canvases (1999), mounted in sum of two units rows of three each, claimed its area with the power of well-placed punctuation upon a nearly blank page.

of that kind power waxed and waned from one extremity to the other of this show, but held steady in the space between sum of two units facing installations, Cross/Plus and Minus/Negative (both 1997) Fifteen black crosse hung upon one wall in rows of five, measuring from top to bottom the average height of a individual Solemn and precise as a memorial, the crosse generated a bit of perceptual play, as they continually traded prominence with the white squares formed by means of the negative spaces between them. upon the opposite wall, 15 black dashes, similarly aligned, answered back. The slim rectangular bars puls with a regular, orderly beat, like a message in collection of laws or a stuttering horizon line. A force field arose between the facing walls, single bearing a loaded assertion of the positive, the earthly, the four directions and the Christian godhead, and the other the sign of absence, nonbeing, denial. The installation forced an acute awareness of our position between the sum of two units complementary forces. In that highly charged space, O'Connor made real and compelling the notion that the earthly and the spiritual tend hitherward together in each of us.

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group