KAREN WILKIN
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saturated grounds, smudges of earth tones emerging from surfaces like
ancient walls had immediate associations with Adolph Gottlieb's
Imaginary Landscapes, Mark Rothko's glowing rectangles, even the over–
scaled heroics of Clyfford Still. Yet the more you looked, the more sys–
tematic Ashbaugh's pictures became. Stacks of blunt rectangles started
looking like disembodied images on a screen; titles took you into the
realm of genetic codes and technological shorthand. Was this just cunning
marketing in an era when "straight" (as opposed to ironic) abstraction is
suspect? Ashbaugh has said that he turned to science and technology as
sources simply in order to have something to paint about, t? stave off
boredom, yet it's arguable that his use of motifs and images given by, say,
genetic mapping is not very different than an earlier generation of abstract
painters' adoption of repeatable formats of their own devising, formats
that allowed them to forget about composition and concentrate, as
Ashbaugh does in his best work, on color, surface, and touch.
Does one have to know that his most Gottlieb- or Rothko-like
paintings derive from images of DNA or that one picture, which evoked
Frank Stella's stripe paintings of the early 1960s, was based on a computer
screen blasted by a virus? Maybe not, since these generating images are, as
yet, not part of most viewers' terms of reference. Whatever their origins,
Ashbaugh's paintings are sensuous, accomplished constructions with un–
usually rich surfaces, gorgeously painted or exploiting untraditional mate–
rials such as corten steel. Learning about their avowed subject brings you
up short, since it is so at odds with the tradition of self-revelation invoked
by the pictures. (Well, except for the "Stella stripe.") At the same time,
Ashbaugh's analogy between the images of state-of-the-art science and
postwar American art can't be entirely ignored. Is this irony or a success–
ful integration of high modernism and high technology? I've heard
Ashbaugh speak about it, and I'm still not sure. But he makes some of the
better paintings I've seen recently.
John Walker's works on paper, at Victoria Munroe Gallery in May,
were a surprise and a pleasure. I had been disappointed by his show of re–
cent paintings at Knoedler Gallery, some months ago; the pictures seem
clotted and congested, as though feeling was being stifled by matter. But
the rarely-exhibited works on paper - which rang changes on similar
motifs, ambiguous, blunt-edged forms, strung together like a chain of
molecules - were luminous and utterly moving. Walker's repetitive all–
purpose shape has unexpected associations. Strangely volumetric and
pre–
sent,
it suggests not only primitive pottery but also landscape forms and
the masks and skulls that have haunted his pictures for years.
The drawings breathed and floated. Strokes, washes, and bleeds
played major roles in their drama. Imagery asserted itself and withdrew,
