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PARTISAN REVIEW
tle pictures in which he takes apart the expressive and physical vocabulary
of gestural abstraction and then puts it back together again. (However
theoretical this may sound, Mulhern's pictures appear to be based on
pure intuition.)
His recent exhibition consisted chiefly of black and white, loosely
constructed paintings that, while small, suggested infinite expansion be–
yond the edge of the canvas, as though their drawing - which always
reads as autonomous fragment, never as boundary - had drifted loose
from some vast, incomprehensible structure. A couple of large, expansive
canvases suggested than Mulhern has entered new territory. It's a terrain
more spatially ambiguous and less reassuring then the zones he had ex–
plored previously, but it may ultimately prove even more stimulating.
The large pictures interested me a great deal because of their awkward–
ness and their sense of discovery. They made me intensely curious about
what will come next.
Gibson's new paintings were, as can be expected of him, seductive
and eerie. He continues to make apparently straightforward "portraits"
of geometric solids, here large spheres with complex patterns, in appar–
ently neutral settings - "apparently" because nothing is ever what it
seems in these pictures. Their full strangeness however, takes time to dis–
cover. If you persevere, monochrome expanses declare themselves as
complex layerings of many hues, incised lines cancel out illusion, and
logic itself is subverted. The glowing spheres levitate. In a vertical rectan–
gular picture with a bottomless blue ground and a ball with pale, rosy
spirals, the space above the ball becomes charged and dramatic; by con–
trast, the square format versions of the motif seem, at first acquaintance,
more harmonious and confrontational, but the regularity of the square
makes evident the asymmetries Gibbon has made you read initially as
symmetries.
It
rapidly becomes clear that what you think you see doesn't
exist.
I'm not suggesting that Gibson's pictures are simply clever optical
games. Far from it. He seems wholly engaged by fundamental questions
about the nature of perception, and he addresses them in purely painterly
terms, exploring the expressive possibilities of moody, luminous colors,
or the spatial drama implicit in shifting the position of the ball. In the
.end, Gibson's paintings seem to be about unfulfilled longing, of yearning
for a state of rational, harmonious order perhaps impossible to achieve.
For all their resonant color, their solemn frontality, and their appeal to
conceptions of the classical, Gibson's pictures prove to be deeply eccen–
tric and all the more fascinating because of it.
One of the surprises of the season was David Bates's show of slightly
tongue-in-cheek sculptures at Charles Cowles Gallery. (They may not be
