Linda Stark at Cirrus - painting exhibit, Los Angeles, California

In her third solo exhibition, Linda Stark has mobilized a formally innovative painterly vocabulary and image bank. Her paintings, displaying an impeccable, against-the-grain facture, stand over against the viewer with quiet obstinacy. With their unpretending scale (none range much above one square foot) they appear as hermetic asides of private allusion, numinous and tantalizing.

sum of two units untitled oils (both 1993) are compos of horizontal striations that increase denser from the paintings' cutting sides toward their centers; one is a magma-hued r the other a penumbral gray. Their delicate trenchs resemble lunar rills or the topography of the ocean floor. Attraction Device (1993) necessitates the eye, through a raised spiral upon an entirely gray field, to locate the design in the circulation of the paint itself, while its ashen pallor works to thwart that inducement. The majority of works in this exhibition--the "weave" paintings-show Stark impressively coalescing a number of formal and symbolic belong tos In Crimson Weave (1992), variegated tints of r appear to be woven in bands, in a witty inversion of the handicraft-fine-art hierarchy. White Weave (1992) is a lambent piece that whitens from a cafe au lait tone to snow. Variegated virid Weave (1992) has bands that vary from olive from one side viridian and form a thick verdure. With Black Blood Weave (1992) the glove are not on so to speak: the sheer visual force of this coagulated tartan makes for a grisly beauty. At the bottom of all these works, overlapping waves of paint trail not on the support, serving as evidence of working process

Elsewhere Stark expands oils to achieve near-sculptural issues By dragging the paint away from the support, she creates jagged files of stalactite forms, then she slathers it back into an emphatic foam In an untitled vertical work of 1992 a lurid r tassel shape floats upon a ground of curdled, peach-colored oil and then spills not on its end. Though certainly abstract, it in some way brings to mind the decisive violence of Artemisia Gentileschi's Death of Holoferne Abstract (1993) have the appearances to take quite literally de Kooning's famous statement, "flesh was the reason on what account oil painting was invented": upon a peach ground, two roseate nipple forms jut out out, twin protrusions upon a landscape of "flesh." This painting achieves the rather unusual state of humorous eroticism.

In all of these paintings Stark plants abstraction at the liminal instant when associations begin to roll forth. The works attain a sort of hard-won sublime, as the labors that brought them into being give them a well-made, tensile enchantment. Just when painting appears tapped out, it is reassuring that of the like kind an able handler of the medium has arrived upon the scene.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group