Doug Ohlson at Andre Zarre - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In Doug Ohlson's paintings, the basic unit is a tall, luminous slab of color. Sometimes it takes five of them to possess a canvas 6 1/2 feet high and 10 feet wide. Sometimes three are enough. Thin strips of a contrasting color establish the cutting sides of the form. Hard-edged or feathered, their boundaries reach calmly above the surface, filling it with quietude. however the depths of these paintings are unsettl Ohlson's burning oranges, yellows and fuchsias are filled with something like shadows.

These colors have a strange ripeness, which had not still appeared in the paintings he showed at the Fischbach Gallery during the late 1960 In those days, the cutting sides of Ohlson's forms were sharp and he was seen as a Minimalist - a "systemic" artist who generated orderly consequences by varying his basic module a tall canvas panel overspreaded by flat, bright color. According to the reigning assumptions of the times, there was sole one way for Ohlson to progress: by the agency of imposing ever more orderliness upon his images. He took a different direction, permitting quirks to inflect his modular variatons; and he persuaded his colors to give up their matte opacity by dint of small, almost unnoticeable degrees. As Ohlson became a virtuoso of atmospheric be incandescent hints of immense open space appeared in the profunditys of his canvases.

During the early 1970 many still believed that art must advance along lines laid down by dint of avant-garde logic. In light of that belief, Ohlson appeared to be drifting backward. It is truer to hint that he had become indifferent to avant-garde crushings While many artists of the '70 were exchanging membership in the avant-garde for political allegiances of single sort or another, Ohlson revealed his affinities to an earlier generation of painters - Barnett Newman and, especially, Mark Rothko He wasn't turning to the past thus much as brushing aside each demand that might have border him to the moment or focused his attention upon the immediate future. By this possess path, he had entered the realm of fresh York abstraction in the heroic mode

A predilection for bright color survives from his early work, along with a liking for tall, rectangular shapes. The elongated panels of his early days have become the vertical slabs of color in his later canvases. Slim and monolithic, this persistent form may be an abstract painter's surrogate for a standing figure - presumably his have An array of these forms is not a throng not an emblem of society, on the other hand the artist's self in various stages - admitting it's easy to be too literal when trying to make faculty of perception of paintings like these. It's better to focus upon edges as they blur, and the figure - solitary or multiplied - dissolves into the sod Colors merge, call one another into question, and you are drawn into a field of light, which is single half of Ohlson's abiding make subordinate The other half is the darkness that his colors at no time quite succeed in banishing.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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