Selected Essays & Reviews
Liminal landscapes: known and unknown worlds
With Thirteen Paintings, his eighth exhibition with Greg Kucera Gallery, Darren Waterston's move away from landscape and figurative toward abstract is nearly complete. Given his previous work, it's hard not to automatically read this current series as landscapes. However, few of them are weighted by fixed horizon lines or any indication that they're even earthbound. Waterston continues to build on symbols, themes, and references introduced in his work long ago, all of which suggest a parallel universe that borrows from ours, but only slightly. 
That world is dense with organic, aquatic, and scientific matter and, even when they don't resemble anything in the known world, they still hold the integrity of figurative work and offer recognizable details, making it a bit more accessible to those who shun abstract art on principle.
Blue Passage is anchored on either side by what looks like an intergalactic cathedral. Angular shards wing about and a halo arcs above. The serene hemisphere of blues is slightly disrupted by Waterston's placement of a singular orange daub of paint near its center. This dot and similar impasto gestures that show up in his other paintings are irresolvable and end up looking like last-minute spontaneous additions to what are otherwise completed works. This tendency to texturize isn't frequent, though. Polished panels like Soft Night, where the paint looks like skin stretched taut, invite swoons. Dark and enchanting, Soft Night is the most landscape-like with windblown trees and distant rock outcroppings providing the background for a drama between spirits. Despite limited references to the familiar, Waterston's paintings still manage to elicit an emotional response, one that is more intuitive than rational and informed by what our subconscious conjures when we're only slightly paying attention.