Martha Keller at Stephen Rosenberg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Martha Keller's novel exhibition was her most focused to date; steadiness of intent and clarity of vision were its commendable forces While the artist's pleasure in materials and meticulously returned surfaces remains evident, these eight fresh paintings rely less on visual seduction than her previous work, preferring a cooler more detached way With the exception of a large wall work, they are vertical rectangles and near squares sectioned into four horizontal bands of equal width or into a series of vertical lines plant close together. They function as a lexicon of modernist motifs-lines or stripes, rectangles or bands, the grid. While the recycling of these formalist devices might be constru as a radical stance upon the part of painters using them as base objects, for Keller, who not ever abandoned them, the act present the appearances more reflective, a commentary rather than a critique.

Her materials are traditional: oil, pigment, wax, graphite, ink above a white-lead ground. She limits her palette to caustic yellow-green transparent red-orange, burnt siena, a range of grays and, in individual case, off-color primaries. Although straight from the tube, the close-valued colors gaze personalized and eccentric. Their application differs; more [i]or[/i] less bands are opaque, smoothed above and dense. Most often, however, the markings of the brush are visible--broad, quick, still carefully placed. In many areas the paint has been thinned, the color attenuated, veiled by dint of a delicate black wash. Certain touches, here and there, bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to blow-ups of clouds or waves; these are made by means of reversing the direction of the hit Keller plays the illusionistic capacities of paint against its straightforward physicality. In works of that kind as Native Declension, Summer Dispersion and Diva, a natural order is reversed: burnt siena is placed in the topmost register, and horizontal zones that might move landscape become more conceptual.

In the largest work in the exhibit Fautrice del Tempo #2 (loosely translated: Keeping Time), tremulous lines of india ink, jagged in tonality, ran from ceiling to floor upon one section of the gallery wall, striping everything they encountered--a clos door, a shutter wall opening, a collapsible calculator This repetitive, pragmatic marking divested itself of formalist purity as it interacted with the architecture. Nonetheless, as substance merg with shadow, pragmatism became poetic.

Keller and many other artists continue to be obsess by means of abstraction; in attempting to extricate it from the impasses of the formalist discourse, they are also trying to discover a time to come for it. That there is single is posited on an undiminished desire for it, a desire which these lucid, elegant paintings do abundant to sustain.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group