Houses in Motion at Theodore:Art

I did not expect a show of this exacting caliber, making it all the more wondrous. Official imagery here: Gallery Link

 and on Facebook under Theodore:Art. Curated by Stephanie Theodore and Jill Weinberg; the install is amazing. Above, detail from Laurie Fendrich's painting: slow, intense, dense, meticulous.

Starting off, the chromatic glow
of near-florescent hues absorbed by packed dirt black stripes by Eric Santoscoy-McKillip provide a visual thesis of sorts for the show.

Gary Petersen's ode to mid-century linearity
brings lightness to tape and layers rendering canvas another color or texture.

The dynamics build quickly and forcefully between works
and by the first grouping, the eye is mystified and delighted.

Sharon Butler's paintingimbues stripes and geometric shapes with unexpectedly casual facture. A visual aporia results from coalesceing soft and hard elements. 

Another spectacular grouping, with Richard Kalina's collaged surface bridging
the terrain between Butler's frisson and Santiscoy-McKillip's surfaces.

It's so smart! We can't really make sense of where we are, yet the decisions
from one artist to the next interrelate in all sorts of subtle ways through tactility, edge, color, and shape.

The narrative continues. The building blocks of house--line, shape, edge--destabilize in paint, arguing for painting's radicality.

Across the room, a jam between Kalina, Butler and Petersen.

Butler's off-the-cuff tensions invite delicious problematics for expectations of stability.

Kalina's edges softened by facture call or respond to Butler's provisional geometries.

Color weaves over surface shifts like a river, binding the works.

Butler's four-step painting surface is covered, not true for all her works in this show. Here and elsewhere edges, sometimes painted other times not, shift focus from inside the painting outward.

This exhibition challenges us in segments, compositional space that refocus decisions from area to area and question solidity in form and perception.