Michael Workman

Go see the new show of work by Richard Hull at the Carrie Secrist Gallery in the West Loop before it closes. In all honesty, I'm usually not much a fan of the work that shows there and was reluctant to set foot inside. It's partially because I regrettably suffer from the same attitude of neglect that many art-world Chicagoans have toward mid-career artists. But that's not entirely why. I've gotten settled into not expecting much from this city's established galleries, who tend after a while to forget why they got into the business they're in. Many show work that safely pulls in the lucre, and they get used to not having to struggle. Reviews get written, clients settle into their tastes. Nothing changes. After a few years of financial cushion, the horizon recedes and it's easier to coast on laurels month after month, year after year. I prefer edgier stuff, art that reaches outside its boundaries and stretches sometimes painfully against proscribed limits, especially if those limits happen to be those of the artist himself: success requires that there exist stumbling blocks and sticking points for us to triumph over.

But it's not just established galleries that have this problem, it seems to dog art wherever it's shown. It's a shame, for instance, that much of the worn-out "alternative" scene shills the term for mainstream acceptance while emulating this same tired status quo. How many "alt" spaces have I been in where it's the same story? If there's one major problem with the Chicago art world, it's our bafflingly intransigent, often academic conservatism. Art requires that we take chances. Trying to make "safe" choices without anywhere near the muscle of the market-valued stables they choose to emulate seems ridiculous at best and at worst an exercise in career murder-suicide.

Luckily, good art gets made despite the sorry state of its system of distribution. I'm glad that I took an artist-friend's suggestion to go see the new show of works up now at Secrist by lifer Richard Hull. Hull's may be one of the un-laziest that I've seen in a long time. What I see in Hull's work is the culmination of a long effort to find new life in old form, an earnest if not often literally heartbreaking attempt to refresh his perspective and enliven what must at some point have slipped into feeling like a rote artistic vision. Combining figurative and abstract elements, Hull's work spans such complementary material as etchings, oil, charcoal and, newly thrown into the mix, good old Crayola crayons. Yes, crayons. It's easy to think of his use of crayons as self-infantilizing, returning the artist to a long-lost moment of creative innocence. While that may bear some truth, the story feels much larger. Crunched into all those layers of childlike illusiveness are networks of high occult symbolism, of struggle, despair and the ability to rise above our "lesser angels." His work does this without going light and airy, without compromising what's essentially just damned good dramaturgy.

Hull builds his images up into macrobiotic forms with buggy, arm- or head-like outgrowths around the extremes, and fills them in with conspicuous geometric lines, architectonic drawings of cityscapes or skylines, perhaps a row of buildings and the barest depiction of figures, often only in outline. Interspersed are the odd circle or rectilinear line placed to disorient the eye, adding volume or emphasizing depths in the picture plane, erring to the side of a convoluted, tortuous finish. Nobody who has seen Hull do this in charcoal or on canvas would likely expect much else of him. While it's a departure in materials, it's not all that scandalous and wouldn't usually merit raves, but in the current climate, it's significant. Crayolas, especially at the point where he has carved into their layers with his blade to form new negative spaces, indicate new vistas in this neatly contained, disturbingly delimited artistic world. Hull has an idea, and while he may not know exactly where he wants to go, he has at least come out with a statement of desire to find that new place. It's what we should expect from any Chicago artist worth their salt. Taking that chance, no matter how small, makes a difference.

Richard Hull shows at Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 West Washington, (312)491-0917, through March 18.

(2006-03-07)

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