The Big Empty

Dike Blair is a painter I have long enjoyed, for his sparse, quiet paintings, their meanings obliquely closed to me. It seems clear to assume that he works from photos. His imagery is modest, small views easy to walk past. His attention to them is our attention to them. What is he on about-- the essence of life, the modern life, our own impatience with things without clear meaning?

It is this interaction that I have with Dike Blair that brings me back to him. His reticent narrative points me back to the big questions: what does it all mean? Why should I sit and look at this? Isn't there more? Like a koan, DB's only answer is a swimming pool in the snow.

Swain Song

Scottish-based artist Tony Swain invites you into a strange world where all is familiar, yet altered. There is a closeness and intimacy in his work, which is perhaps owing to the materiality, the matte colors and the tactility of the newspaper. But perhaps the intimacy is constructed out of the particulars Swain introduces into each compositions, specifics which feel very routine, even as, in their new configuration, they are quite alien. All in all, there is a fresh, unexpected appeal in Swain's work.

Squares of Brillhart

Jenny Brillhart, a Miami-based artist, explores the abstract structural values of reality. To achieve the cool purity of abstraction, her real-scapes must be devoid of particulars, and people. Her interest in shapes against each other, nuanced color, thin lines across the page recall artists like Rackstraw Downes and other pared-down realists (whose names are escaping me momentarily...). However, Brillhart and Downes appear to be after a different set of aesthetics: he, enquiry into space and structure; she, enquiry into two-dimensional composition.

I see Brillhart's interest lying in the achievement of an actived rectangle, read on the same two-dimensional plane. Compositionally speaking, one can conjure Piet Mondrian, arrangement of squares. That the squares stand for theosophical functions adds the second-layer of meaning to Mondrians work. Brillhart's second meaning maybe a statement on the cold, bleached world of Miami. Or, maybe at the moment it's just squares.