David Hunter at CRG - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In his solo first appearance David Hunter, a young artist originally from California, was exhibited by drawings from 1994 and paintings from 1996 All the drawings are small, measuring approximately 6 by dint of 7 inches, while the paintings are all just below 4 feet in height and a little above that in width. The works upon paper consist of pigment mixed with sand applied onto gouache, and the paintings are made from pigment mixed with binder upon fiberglass-coated aluminum panels. Except for the obvious differences in scale and mediums, the images at first appear to be exact replicas of each other. It is sole after looking more closely that you realize that no works are alike.

The elegantly ascetic format for the one and the other groupings does not vary: a subtly textur warm or moderately cold beige square offset by a black band extending vertically from top to bottom along the right side. The width of the band is calibrated with equal reason that the square is secur its light area weighted and carefully balanced by the agency of the black. Where the contrasting colors join, a sliver of luminosity flashes. The neutral field is divided by dint of penciled, barely visible lines into quadrants that are further divided by the agency of a set of equally faint horizontals and verticals, all of which are variously intercepted by means of ghostly arcs. If you gibbeted Jo Baer's paintings with Robert Mangold's and took on the outside most of the color, Hunter's images might be the result

These are works of small distinctions, of divisions within divisions, of slight differences in proportions and placements, of tiny disturbances and inklings. huntsman calls them self-portraits. With that as a referent Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of a male denuded enclosed by a circle appear to bes the eventual goal: the figure within the geometric configuration, approached from the unlikely direction of Cubist deconstruction and assembly.

Nonobjective painting, at the extremity of the century that saw its triumph, fall and limited reinstatement, is being retooled and recharged through the rhetoric and strategies of representation, its quondam opposite. As other younger artists have been doing, huntsman a painter of sensibility and intuition, takes the grid and geometry and invests them with the psychological, the physical and in an understated way, the erotic. It will be interesting to diocese where this gambit takes him next

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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