Carolee Toon at Kiyo Higashi - Los Angeles, California - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Last spring observes Angeles galleries were aglow with monochromatic works from artists of that kind as Maxwell Hendler, James Hayward, Roy Thurson and tax Heywood. Carolee Toon shares with these mates a mastery of tonal subtleties, accomplished in her case by the agency of applying layer upon layer of oil enamel to plywood panels. To create her sumptuous verdants mauves and pale blues, Toon painstakingly builds up as many as 70 layers of paint, thereby achieving virtuosic consequences of luminescence.

end their insistent stasis, monochromes present the appearance to assert a kind of ideal purity, elevating color into the realm of the sublime. The uniqueness of Toon's works, however, lies in their slightly irregular forms. Starting with a conventional square or rectangular piece of birch plywood she sands down the panel's cutting sides by hand, usually creating about a half-inch sloping frame around the work. The rises are uneven and sometimes lumpy borders which endow her paintings with a homemade gaze These signs of the maker's hand humanize her radiant colors. Like Agnes Martin's hand-drawn lines, the subdu wobble of Toon's cutting sides imbue her paintings with emotion.

Individual layers of Toon's eight-ply panels are revealed as they are sanded down, creating concentric lines within the border cutting sides In Becoming, the inside cutting side of the border is painted a dark amethystine setting off the rich, greenish teal-blue of the painting. In the sanded-down border of Past azure one deep-blue line seems to beseech what might have been the full-bodied past of the pale sky-colored surface of the painting. Related to each other like fraternal twins, the squarish diptych panels of Touch virid are distinguished by differing shades of pale virid and by rounded or squared-off corners.

The unpredictable moldings of Toon's paintings function similarly to the irregular shapes of John McCracken's novel sculptures and reliefs, which add for a like reason much to those works' mystery and nearness With their slightly off-kilter shapes, Toon's finished surfaces appear to be records of momentary observations rather than signs of some ideal state. These user-friendly monochromes appear to be less divine than fully and fantastically human.

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