KAREN WILKIN
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depth. Did the golden "curtains" frame the darkness or push it for–
ward? Or were they embedded in it?
Forge's deliberate deposits of color are self-sufficient parts of a picto–
rial fabric-he speaks of his dots as "real"-not pointillist marks sub–
servient to illusion. Even though each picture is rooted in the painter's
experience of place and time (and it shows) they are equally about the
fact of a repetitive touch and the material character of the paint that
touch deposits on a surface. Those dots-or in some paper works,
rhythmic strokes-become, like Cezanne's touches, building blocks of
reconstituted sensation, not a means of depiction.
It
was particularly
illuminating to see Forge's apparently dispassionate, but strangely
charged meditations on nature in the company of Robert Miller's con–
current exhibition of Joan Nelson's updated versions of Romantic land–
scape painting. The difference, I suppose, is that between mediated and
unmediated experience. Forge aims at being truthful to his perceptions,
as directly as possible, in the material of paint; Nelson assumes a faux–
nineteenth-century vision of a subverted Sublime to illustrate ideas
about an idea about nature. At Robert Miller, Nelson's ruminations on
the history of landscape painting seemed pretty airless and inert, despite
their often spectacular subject matter, but maybe that was the point–
the failure of art in the face of nature, or something of the kind. By con–
trast, Forge's painstaking expanses of scintillating dots seemed all the
more atmospheric and alive.
That mid-career artists still believe in the expressive power of
abstract painting was borne out by shows by Michael Mulhern at
Salander-O'Reilly and Pat Lipsky at Elizabeth Harris. On one level,
Mulhern's large, gestural, near-monochrome abstractions continued
the dissection of painterly painting that has preoccupied him for the
past decade or so, but, as in the past, his seemingly detached, thought–
ful research produced disquieting, poetic images that are anything but
detached. Mulhern appears to break painting into such irreducible
components as touch, expanse, and layering; he appears absorbed by
fundamental questions of the painting's existence as object and as illu–
sion, yet he also seems to ponder more elusive notions of the meaning
of concealment-both literally and metaphorically.
In Mulhern's recent pictures, generous sweeps of metallic aluminum
paint simultaneously obliterate or thinly veil loose constellations of
drifting marks. The shifting inflections of density and matteness of the
surface, the degree of visibility of the tracks of his painting tools, even
the tonal and coloristic variations in his rich palette of greys, off-browns,
and near-blacks depend upon how and when Mulhern manipulates his
