490
PARTISAN REVIEW
imply that his pictures were literal or predictable. Anything but. I've com–
mented before on the overtones of both German Expressionism and the
pioneer generation of American modernists in Hatton's dense, lively
images, and his solo show of generously scaled canvases bore this out; I
kept thinking about Burchfield and Hartley, and maybe early Kandinsky,
with a nod to the Matisse of the
papiers coupes,
but Hatton's recent work
also bore out his originality. He paints a visionary, cheerful world of con–
siderable charm, constructed out of flattened, highly simplified landscape
forms, saturated color, and crisp-edged shapes. Everything is so taut and
broadly indicated that the pictures demand to be considered as much in
terms of putting paint on canvas as in terms of references to nature.
Vertiginous shifts of scale and spatial tilts even provoke thoughts about
Western painting's accumulated conventions of representing near and far.
Hatton's best pictures read as though geologic forces or the thrust of
growth had pushed everything toward the surface, although they can also
be weirdly animated; in one, a brilliant blue loop of river reared up like a
giant snake humping across a field. I'll be interested to see what happens
next.
Also at Elizabeth Harris, Elisa D'Arrigo showed modestly sized wall–
hung sculptures constructed with little bound cloth bundles, tightly packed
into ambiguous configurations and delicately colored. Their inheri tance
from the Eva Hesse/Louise Bourgeois tradition of feminist "soft" sculp–
ture was plain, but they were no less engaging for declaring their lineage.
D'Arrigo has a real sensitivity to issues of scale that allows her to exploit
subtle size differences in both her components and her finished gatherings
of bundles. In addition, small variations in how open or closed the bundles
are, or how tightly wrapped or packed, all help to enlarge their associations,
so that the best works flutter between suggestions of the natural world and
the body, between artisanal craft and pure accumulation.
Stephen Westfall's cool, dispassionate recent canvases at Lennon–
Weinberg were at the opposite end of the emotional and theoretical
spectrum from either Hatton's paintings or D'Arrigo's constructions.
Westfall's pictures were, as they have been for some years, demonstrations
of apparently rational geometric systems, created and then deliberately dis–
rupted. I say "apparently" because nothing is ever quite what it purports
to be. Westfall seems to conceive of a picture in the simplest, almost reduc–
tive terms: a flat rectangular surface marked by restatements of the vertical
and horizontal. But he cons tantly raises and defeats our expectations.
Proportions change; grids slip out of aljgnment; edges fail to connect.
Westfall's paintings can be one-liners, failing to hold your attention once
you have cracked the "code," but when they succeed, they are not simply
displays of theoretical possibilities, but images that compel your visual as
