Martin Mull at David Beitzel - art exhibition - Brief Article

Martin Mull's exhibition consisted of 13 watercolors and six oil paintings upon canvas, all executed in 1999 with the exception of single picture from '98. In these works, the artist explores the paradigmatic white American middle-class family, presenting a man, his wife, son and daughter, their house and belongings, and the family dog. The imagery brings to mind magazines and children's works of the '40s and '50 Mull's mode of expression is characterized by a fragmentary treatment of form, a aptitude to reduce shapes to essentials and a testing of traditional notions of finish.

In Pillar to pillar (watercolor on paper, 23 through 20 inches), the torsos of a man and woman hold the top center of the composition. solitary their clothes are shown; they lack heads and hands. A stop of landscape, receding illusionistically, is painted below the man. His arms appear to repose on the landscape as if it were a table. muddle is good at exploiting horizontals of reality in ways occasionally akin to Magritte, whose periode vache is evok by means of the looseness of the brushwork and the muddying of the colors. The horizontal slab of landscape overlaps a next to the first landscape slab placed on its side upon the left. The sky, houses and mould of the latter serve as a foil for the man's torso. A pink rectangle plays the same character on the right for the woman, who stands behind her husband. The drawing's title could deliver over to the blocklike treatment of the forms.

In his oils, mess uses a bright, varied palette, with large voids of tarnished canvas, making them airier than the drawings. The paintings have the appearance of palimpsests, with rubbed-out passages, and residues of paint and turpentine streaming down the canvas. Chase (oil upon linen, 20 by 24 inches) present to views the body of a running stripling (without head, hands or feet) a house in a landscape, the head and torso of a girl turn rounded upside down, a dog and a pair of leg and feet all loosely painted and floating in an indefinable space. The picture has to do with children's play, granting Mull's fragmented bodies and unorthodox compositional strategies refer to the possibility of calamity. muddle is keen on determining in what way much abstraction he can suffer seep into his compositions, as he enumerates his stories about family life.

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