Selected Essays & Reviews

Abstraction brings many rich rewards

Review by Holly Myers, Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2005

At its worst, contemporary abstraction can feel like trendy cop-out: a sanctioned way of avoiding the messiness of the real world, with its complicated networks of symbols and codes, and a shirking of the artist's responsibility to communicate something identifiably meaningful.

At its best, however, abstraction opens up new worlds, gathering the energy of the known and projecting it into the unknown without forsaking the sensibility or interests of the average viewer.

The recent paintings of San Francisco-based artist Darren Waterston, now at Michael Kohn Gallery, fall decidedly into the latter category. In these works, Waterston abandons the repertoire of iconographic elements that dotted earlier compositions — flowers, vines, birds, monkeys, insects and the like — leaving only ambiguously organic suggestions of form floating against fields of watery pigment.

Far from seeming vague or obscure, however, the result feels only richer, more precise and more roundly seductive.

The key is a vigorous formal sensibility and a breathtaking mastery of technique. These are thoroughly absorbing paintings, filled with spatial and textural variety, and continually surprising: hard-edged slivers of black scatter across blurry, luminous pools of green; soft, broad, feathery strokes alternate with perfect, hair-thin outlines and craggy silhouettes; circular lumps of white paint cling like barnacles to thin, translucent washes; human fingerprints pop up occasionally throughout.

The result is a strange and enchanting landscape in which it would be easy to lose oneself indefinitely.