Selected Essays & Reviews

Waterston moves toward union of mental and physical

Review by Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 2003

Darren Waterston, a painter who recently relocated to San Francisco from Los Angeles, has been edging toward a breakthrough for some years.

The best of his new work at Haines nearly gets there.

Waterston has found, in his own sleek style, a clue to one of the deep problems of contemporary painting: how to evoke the quotient of inner experience in the making of a picture using only the inherited materials of the art.

Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst found analogies for inner mental states in fantastic landscapes. Others have sought the impress of bodily experience in traces of the painting process, from Jackson Pollock paint-slinging to Yves Klein rolling paint-dipped nude women across his canvases.

But translating pictorially the subjective unity of mental and physical in the painter's experience has been the ultimate difficulty.

Waterston comes close in a picture such as "Linguistics" (2002). Here a deep foggy space prevails, with streaks suggestive of breaking clouds. Dark peaks, like stalagmites, at the picture's bottom edge suggest a submarine landscape.

Drifting down the middle of the picture are lozenges of red, lavender, black and white. Some of them affirm the resistant surface of the painting, others seem to dissolve into it, perhaps retracing transits of Waterston's attention while working.

Ghosts of forms suggestive of viscera mingle with the touches that read as abstract. They hint almost too literally at the painter's loss and regaining of bodily consciousness during work time.

"Linguistics" and a few other pieces on view stand on their own as elegant pictorial exercises, even for those who never engage the work's philosophical strivings, though one leaves this show, like Waterston's previous ones, with the sense that tougher editing might have made it stronger.