Michael Workman

"Inner Positive," at the West Loop's Klein Art Works, opens an array of joy, concentration, longing, serenity and decisive action that's a pleasure to view. The show includes work by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner, Cheonae Kim of Southern Illinois, and Canadian-born artist Agnes Martin of Galisteo, New Mexico. Grouping these three women painters could have proven disastrous and that's half the payoff when it all turns out well in the end.

Upon entering, patrons encounter Cheonae Kim's work. Kim's task could almost be reduced to a familiar medical-school refrain: "Breathe in, breathe out. That's what breathing's all about." Cool and meditative, her works struggle through direct reflections on form and color to reference the basic assumptions of horizontal and vertical forms: longevity and activity versus death and stasis. Viewed straight on, they read like a pattern of color-coding or a DNA sampling set. Shift slightly to either side, however, and the color that extends over the edge of the canvas straight out to the wall also functions to extend the work into a blurry third-dimensional plane. Different colors have also been mapped out to repeat at intervals, blending in and out of adjacent colors, falling in and out of perceptible sequence. Browns. Greens. Yellow. Orange. As intended, the eye travels along the canvases from hot to cool, through different hues and intensities. No color extrudes to the detriment of its strict geometry.

If Kim's paintings depict horizontal and vertical, two and three dimensions, Grabner's offer particular and universal, whole and part. Staggering her canvases in both size and placement, on the surface this series resemble the drip-dot paintings of Spanish artist Teo González. Eschewing the variable distribution and sizing of González's dots, however, Grabner goes instead for a consistency of size and a formal surety that follows on the circular pattern of her earlier color-ring paintings. A basis in the philosophical investigations of phenomenology is certainly implied here, as well as its artistic corollary in an emergent distance of the human visual range. Here, that range appears at once crumbling and tensely balanced, a constellation held in place by a web of unseen natural forces. Neither strikes the eye nor the intelligence so much as does the overarching sense of static moment dividing recess from progress, forward from back, history from hopeful future.

Agnes Martin's work lingers in the background of this exhibit, cloaked by the saturation and pulsating color and motion of Kim and Grabner's canvases. Easily dismissed, but centrally significant, Martin's canvases are the binding element of "Inner Positive." Though often lumped in as a Minimalist, Martin's work instead maximizes the intensity of, and the necessity for, a careful investigation into the variance of her hand-drawn lines. At a middle distance, her canvases resemble permutations on a standard sheet of college-rule notebook paper. Up close, however, the line that delineates the grid suffuses itself to the overbearingness of the barely perceptible off-white, threatening to unseat the balance between form and content. Do line and color act in balance or do they provide the necessary tension to divide for a programmed visual outcome? What allows either to function as a canvas? Oppression? Or freedom? A single heartbeat could forever change the outcome. Until the next forever, that is. And yet, despite any fixed resolution of these internalized stresses, a gentle symbiosis of opposites has been achieved.

Puzzle pieces

Chicago-based artist Eric Tucker certainly has a keen awareness of the visual mechanics of those geometric anomalies known as multistable figures. In "Untitled (box & dot)," the artist makes a direct reference to a Necker Cube, long a key diagram for demonstrating the visual shift of such figures. And he has taken that awareness to a higher degree at a show of his recent Minimalist sculptures at Zg Gallery in the River North neighborhood.

Gaze through Tucker's hexagonal Plexiglas-shaped floor pieces and viewers must choose a position from which best to situate line and color in perspective: none are dictated for them. In fact, that's exactly the point. By placing the hexagonal forms on a colored square background, here at one side of the color wheel from each other, there exactly the same, Tucker intends to subvert the received wisdom of line and color. Color bright enough to decorate an infant's playroom snaps almost painfully in the eye, and line, previously the more rational of the two, floats free of the object's edge. All gets upended when geometry falls apart, with no edge to relate in the search for a center.

"Inner Positive" shows at Klein Art Works, 400 North Morgan, (312)243-0400, through March 20. Eric Tucker, "Recent Sculptures" shows at Zg Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-9900, through March 13.

(2004-02-25)

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