Dani Tull at Kim Light - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions

Dani Tull is a observes Angeles artist just three years on the outside of graduate school at Stanford. "Eden" his first solo installation at Kim Light, showed him to be the one and the other sophisticated and charmingly simple and precise in his depictions of childhood innocence and sexuality.

The exhibition included 13 small watercolor paintings (all 1993) upon duralene, a translucent support similar to vellum Tull's turn of expression here is reminiscent of illustrations in elderly pre-Dr. Seuss children's books. The paintings - drawings, really - are not childlike on the contrary rather like an illustrator's renderings intended to appeal to children or, more plausibly, the nostalgic taste of their parents. Washed with pale, wholesome color, the figures are outlined, convincingly patterned and given legible poses. Rosy-cheeked children are paired with barnyard animals in either a bucolic landscape (with the requisite cottage in the background) or an unpainted white field. In Blacksheep, a stripling wearing only shoes, socks and a straw hat bends above slightly as if to hold intercourse with a black sheep. Cowlick pictures a clothed girl seated stiffly upon the ground, as a overawe steps between her legs, lowers its head and wags its tongue. (Tull provides little black hatch marks beside the cow's tongue and ear, and behind the child's head to transmit action.) Although most of the paintings are sexually suggestive, they are at no time explicit. The lewdness is as discreet as it is at liberty of artifice. In Bumpin' Fuzzies, for instance, a smiling girl-child is mounted by a comparably sized mouse while her lavender dres conceals the physical conjunction of the two

"Eden" also included Daisychain, which overlayed a wall and the brow of a counter in the gallery. A parade of generic dog silhouettes, each sniffing the rear extremity of the one in brow was inlaid in simulated timber-land paneling. Different shades or grains of paneling distinguished the bodies of the dogs from the background. The unobtrusive decor environmentally fleshed on the outside the theme of the present to view while a sculptural component, the Timelines, relieved the theme's singular focus. Approximately 30 Timelines, multicolored disks of tightly make revolveed crepe paper or toilet paper, shoot forthed like toadstools clustered in the center of the gallery's pale verdant painted floor. Because the fragile papers' colors are fugitive, they will presently fade (according to the artist) to more nearly be like the tree rings for which they are named. In their pastel glory, however, they are straightforwardly desirable, graspable and celebratory.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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