Wesley Kimler
There’s a church in Venice, the Frari, that contains two Titian altarpieces. One painting is especially sublime–a famous Assumption in which Mary rises dramatically, almost subsumed by the pale light of yellow clouds. Farther back in the church, a 19th-century neoclassical monument to Titian includes stone reliefs of several of his paintings, including the airy Assumption, which can also be glimpsed in the distance. Seeing the two together reveals the absurdity of making a stone relief of this painted depiction of transcendence: what makes the painting great, the interaction between Mary’s implied movement and the sky’s delicate light and colors, is completely lost in stone. The relief gives only the outlines of the picture: weighty, static, dead, it is the utter opposite of Titian’s moving testament to his faith.
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Gestural abstract painters most often give their pictures coherence in one of two ways. The vast network of lines in Pollock’s drip paintings is ultimately rhythmic–perhaps these are the unpredictable, improvisational rhythms of jazz, but they’re musical nonetheless. De Kooning takes the other tack: his canvases are remarkable for their heterogeneity, including several different modes of picture making within the same work. But the parts interact with a visionary intensity, as if the picture were struggling to make opposites cohere–and succeeding. Kimler appears to owe a debt to both approaches, but doesn’t succeed with either. Surgeon Head recalls de Kooning’s evocation of figures in his nearly abstract paintings: a few thickly painted lines here suggest the outlines of a head. The free lines are balanced by more geometrical colored rectangles; streaks and splotches appear throughout, as well as color variations within the rectangles. But none of the parts work together, and nothing leads anywhere; the lines and colors seem artificially spliced together.
There are many different kinds of brushwork in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but prominent among them are solid rectangles of color, recalling Hans Hofmann’s colored squares within fields of more diverse multicolored forms. But Hofmann keeps his solid colors empty, allowing pure pigment its own integrity within his expressionistic compositions, creating a dramatic contrast. Kimler can’t resist filling his rectangles with more shapes, creating a clutter that reminded me of finger paintings by children who don’t know when to quit. Kimler does leave one solid green rectangle at the lower right mostly empty, and I got more pleasure out of that green field than any other part of the image. When you prefer looking at paint alone to the shapes the artist creates, you know he’s detracting from, not adding to, the possibilities of seeing.
At first Tapper’s works were merely interesting to look at, but then the cracks between the planks began to command as much attention as the layers of pigment. I also noticed that it’s often hard to tell which parts are simply accretions of several layers and which have also been abraded. Material presence, in the form of wood and pigment, is presented as the equal of material absence–cracks, dents, abrasions. Doubly modest, the artist avoids the organizational schemes of traditional abstract art, in which one feels every mark is the product of the artist’s mind, while suggesting natural erosion and decay. I found the balance between created forms and suggestions of natural processes immensely moving.
