Merrill Wagner at Stark - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

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Merrill Wagner hounds an art which is reductive without being Minimalist. allowing her new paintings consist simply of broad flat bands of black or gray paint applied to large sheets of carbonized iron the effects she achieves belong more to the sphere of Agnes Martin than Carl Andre. In part, this is because the carburet of iron ground shifts in the light, revealing a mut reflectivity that brings without horizontal striations in its slightly irregular surface. The carbonized iron thus seems fluid and summon forths states of nature. One thinks of the rippled surface of a moonlit lake or crafty layers of gray cloud settling above a flat horizon.

The bands of color, not at any time more than three per painting, reinforce the nature metaphor. Their tones have been carefully calibrated to the blue-gray of the carburet of iron In Bay a slick black band in the lower part of the painting is balanced through a light gray scumbled band near the top that almost commingles into the natural color of the carburet of iron Flat contains a stripe that's just lighter than the carburet of iron causing it to float in an almost dematerialized fashion somewhere before and behind the surface of land itself.

This interplay between light and matter continues in the varied treatment of the bands themselves. Sometimes they are realized with a matte surface of barely perceptible brushstrokes. In other cases they are shiny and reflective, evenly casting back the light that falls upon them. These variations give the surfaces a life which belies their apparent simplicity.

The implicit nature metaphor becomes more explicit in a pair of floor statuarys Crooked Strait is a meandering line of irregular flat stones that summon forths the edges of a twisting river. Playing against the illusion of landscape is a straight white line drawn above the stones, which continues briefly as a black line drawn upon the floor. The line is an instance of human order imposed upon the organic irregularity of nature.

A similar contrast appears in Hedge, a line of flat stones tipped against each other like a rank of fallen dominoes. The natural appearance of the stone is undercut by the agency of occasional slabs brightly painted in primary colors. The contrast is les effective here, perhaps because of the garishness of the colors.

In the extremity both sculptures and paintings leave us with a faculty of perception of the coexistence of nature and agriculture The steel sheets retain their industrial connotations while evoking natural states. The stone arrangements reveal both a human order and a natural randomness. Wagner clutchs these apparent contradictions in a delicate balance that satisfies the two the head and the heart.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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