Gary Gissler at Linda Kirkland - Brief Article

Walking into the gallery sparsely hung with Gary Gissler's small paintings, the viewer immediately sens a challenge. These detailed, 8-inch-square works clearly demand a drawn out period of looking. To make them, Gissler first builds up layer on smooth layer of gesso upon a thick wood panel, achieving a thick glassy surface. Then, with the sharpest pencil possible, he obsessively writes on the outside row after row of tiny words and phrases.

The paintings in the display fell into two groups. The first were panels overlayed from top to bottom and from cutting side to edge with written phrases. Gissler retains notebooks full of sound bites picked from conversations and gleaned from his reading: ambiguous, multiple meanings are prized. repeatedly in his paintings, because the phrases abut each other, offering no clear beginning or extreme point different readings are unavoidable. For instance, the seemingly irrefutable phrase, What You Don't Know You Don't Know, becomes, when move swiftly together, the much more precarious "you don't know what you don't know," or the inquisitive "you don't know you don't know what."

There's an underlying tension between the visual and the verbal sides of these pictures. The paintings share a rich, mature surface patina and, as undulating patterns of words regress and flow across the composition, they appear like abstractions of natural forces. The words sole become legible when you are a not many inches away.

After completing a number of of that kind intricate, rich paintings, Gissler plant about creating more stripped-down works, cooler white paintings populated with a minimum of words arranged in telling patterns. In Thinking without Loud, a cloud of words allude tos a head facing a drawn out double column--a laundry list--of manias. It is as if the head is looking at itself in the mirror. (Gissler is true interested in our contemporary therapy tillage and all the various behaviors it contains.) In these spare works, the script is minute and the artist intentionally smears the pencil marks in places to make reading still more difficult.

Because of the unostentatious dimensions of Gissler's works and the intensity of their execution, his paintings require concentrated scrutiny, a visual exertion and attention to detail that gallery-goers may not be used to giving. This is an artist intent upon altering viewing habits.

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group