Steven McCallum at Allan Stone - Brief Article

Bringing a frantic mix of approaches to his work, painter Steven McCallum makes big (sometimes above 17 feet wide), neon-hued geometric abstractions that look to vibrate with color and agitated graphic activity. His compositions are ofttimes structured around large rectangular or oval forms built of intense planes of electric color. gibbeted by darting vectors and broad arching forms, the paintings show a sense of pitched perspectival space. by means of repeatedly layering and peeling not on tape, McCallum leaves the surfaces of his acrylics crisscrossed with a shallow topography. The overall event is of a window whose view spills outward toward a herded infinite, psychedelic realm.

McCallum is not after sublime relationships between unstained forms; he leans toward retinal overload, antic change and color games that border upon Op art. His signature issue is a vividly chromatic grid of squares or disks that modulates from, say, a burning red to a brilliant yellow-gold In paintings of the like kind as Zydeco Z's (1998) he introduces a further uncompounded body in the form of big transparent circles. one time the underlying graphic patterns penetrate these pictorial balloons, they are transformed as mut tinges give way to their brilliant counterpart at the other extremity of the spectrum.

These paintings are meant to corrupt indeed, to ravish the viewer with a kinetic color wheel of lavish combinations. While McCallum's approach to color can sometimes look a bit manipulative--more like a memorized technical trick than an organically generated visual phrase--he nevertheless summons a genial Pop sensibility genuinely through pigment and abstract visual consequence Encountering these hyperkinetic paintings is like walking into a big, churning, gregarious party. one time you've been hit with that first rush of high-pressure conviviality, it's difficult to just walk away.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group