Terry Winters at Sonnabend - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Terry Winters's fresh paintings provide discontinuous glimpses into the jewel. Illustrated put 5 (1994) has a shiny, fat-brushed, bright gold-colored ground into which abrupt, prismatic forms have been hewn. Within these triangular window shapes is a whole other world of fragile black-and-white webs and dreamy azure washes. I wondered whether there might be another composition beneath the fulvid ground and whether that startling color might have been the last thing added. Illustrated put 8 (1994) likewise suggests a cloisonne that is not predetermined on the contrary rather arrived at. A big central gestalt call fors up the image of an octopus head, a human heart, a large flower and flat a late-Picassoid face. But the painting's deliberate, short, repeating parallel lines, which recall woodcut hatching, and its orange network of forms, reminiscent of crystalline development remain determinedly abstract; they don't illustrate anything coagulate Here, too, Winters's palette remains consummately dusky with large sweeps of green-gray solitary occasionally underscored with rich sky-coloreds burnt oranges and a pale, dirty yellow

of the like kind passages of epicurean color were the greatest surprise and also the greatest risk of this present to view Winters is best known for his painterly explorations of the brown-gray-green range, and although, in fact, there are many instances of authentic color in his '80s and early '90 oeuvre that ultimate part has until now seemed more effectively submerg in a miasma of earth tones and grisaille. What Winters did in this display was both brave and chancy. He laid upon enough orange to make me think of Friedensreich Hundertwasser's utopian confections from the '60 and enough close-toned amethystines to make me want to head for the orgone receptacle Yet where many viewers might have seen sole psychedelic bathos, I sensed that Winters was trying to rip the wooliness not on his palette and give us something more primal, les equivocal and more immediate.

In sum of two units large series of works upon paper, one acrylic and individual watercolor, the artist appears to be feeling his way from the delineation of organic forms towards the exploration of more metaphysical networks. Generally, the works upon paper tend to read as abstractions of heads or city maps, and here one time again we get a slightly hackneyed feeling of '60 urban utopias, as well as an intimation of psychic blossoming greatest in quantity often associated with the early Mondrian. In Viewing Transformation 12 (1993) an orange-and-yellow orb contains a twisting and turning, volumetric disclosure of triangles interlaced with shades of verdant brown and purple. This work creates a temper of autumnal saturation while also suggesting the image of a day-star a moon, a cityscape and a cat's head. Winters's way with organic allusion has always change abouted dangerously close to the sentimental: who other could have achieved such early '80 succes with the imagery of crystals and mushrooms? on the other hand in this show Winters pushed the touchy-feely aspects of his painting towards an at any time edgier, chromatic triumph.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group