Dusty Boynton at Littlejohn/Sternau - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The new paintings of Dusty Boynton are accretions of small incidents that together add up to luminous, richly textur expanses. In a display superficially reminiscent of MOMA's novel Ryman retrospective, Boynton exhibited mainly white or off-white canvases, admitting her layering of rice-paper and acrylic paint gives her works a deeper (albeit still shallow) space than his. Rather than the defining brushstroke, Boynton uses pencil or charcoal, or she scratches into the paint to record a succession of intimate gestures. The thin layers, alternating between transparency and opacity, take the organ of sight in and out of the picture's surface. Her moderate process yields paintings that rod on the obsessive, but the total event of quietude justifies their methodical construction.

Boynton's work has gone end a transformation over the past scarcely any years, shifting from a naive figuration described through reviewers as childlike to a contemplative, discreet abstraction. In the interim, she produc a material part of works on paper that incorporate patterns of hand-stamped and hand-colored images of that kind as fruit, often combined with magazine illustrations or sheets of aged ledger paper.

In her rife paintings, Boynton eschews clearly identifiable images. In Poultice, single of three large (62 by dint of 100 inches) 1993 paintings exhibited, Boynton applied drawn out horizontal bands of paper above other sections of paper and paint to give an inkling of a view, through translucent venetian blinds, of a warm, bleached landscape. The other layers are not with equal reason much hidden as they are held gently in place, giving particular resonance to the work's title, a kind of place of abode remedy for minor ailments (a "hot moist mass of flour, mustard, etc" according to Webster's).

Submission is divided into nearly equal sections of 8-by-10-inch paper, alternately white and linen-colored. Lined up across the elongated checkerboard are tiny lines of stark white rice-paper sections each less than an inch in longitudinal dimensions In this painting, which summons ancient decorative walls, the handmade aspect debars the repeating elements from becoming static and presents a soothing rhythm and textural complexity.

The graphite scribbles that punctuate the surface of Listener are tiny parcels of imploding energy. They are indecipherable notations, small occurrences that are arranged in seemingly arbitrary on the contrary orderly rows of collaged paper upon a pale peach-colored ground. Boynton has tapped into an Eastern, Cagean simplicity that presents many unexpected levels of pleasure.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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