"Ebb & Flow".

Driggs, Janet Owen

Raid Projects, Los Angeles CA December 2-30, 2006

Curated by U.K.-based artists Jimmy Conway-Dyer, Alistair Payne, and Claude Temin-Vergez, "Ebb & Flow (Part II)" is a thoughtful interrogation of what it might mean to be "painterly" now. In particular, having apparently embraced Deleuze's rhizomatic model of dynamic multiplicity, the curatorial trio have identified artists who take painting sensibilities in unforeseen directions.

Traveling to Raid Projects from London's Three Colts Gallery, "Ebb & Flow" presents painting, sculpture, and videos along with various hybrid works, including David Ryan's exhibition essay. The hinge is Diana Cooper's Close To It (2004), a part-relief, part-cutout in which explosive Missoni-like patterns encounter a formalist grid. Cross-layered both physically and graphically, Close To It pivots between those exhibits that operate inside the frame, those that come off the wall, and those that engage screen-based technologies to introduce explicit movement into the equation. Belonging to the first group is Michael Stubbs's EF Vanitas #2 (2006), whose viscous layers are poured, brushed, and stenciled onto a mirrored aluminum ground to create a pulsating figure/ground multiplex. Taking a different route, Temin-Vergez's almost atonal Hybrid #1 & 2 (2003) bristles with intricate patterns designed to stimulate what the artist describes as a restless "flow of vision." Denying the wall entirely, Phyllida Barlow's Untitled (2006) wood, tape, and cardboard structure is reminiscent of an elongated hobbyhorse, which stretches from ceiling to floor, creating a powerful diagonal in space. Similarly freestanding, but more in deference to gestural pictorialism than pure mark making, Conway-Dyer's 21st Century Green Man (2006) is a two-sided metal frame from which are hung pastel-colored plastic circles "drawn" like a face. In contrast, Fransje Killaars's bed-like installations confound any frontal view by operating as colorful mediations between floor and wall that, because they are represented in Part II by a poster (Blanquet of Light, 2002), also mediate here between actual and depicted space.

Completing the trio of strategies, Edgar Schmitz-Evans's Doooon (2005) uses the motion possibilities of an animation loop to depict the repeated collapse of a pink building (the Monkey Palace from Disney's 1942 Jungle Book). Likewise, Alistair Payne's Untitled (2006)--a looped projected close-up of oil meeting water--continually fills its screen/wall with raspberry-tinted bubbles that roil in a glass tank, build to an orgiastic climax, and then subside before bubbling up again.

Collectively exchanging the concept (or "being") of an established ground--the static surface upon which paint ebbs, flows, and dries--for an inconstant "becoming," the works selected for "Ebb & Flow" take a fittingly heterogeneous approach when exploring relations among motion, finality, and immobilization. At the same time, multiplicity speaks to the very stuff of paint, an inherently viscous entity that both flows and resists flow. Uncannily reminiscent of the ambitious position taken on sculpture by the Hammer's recent "Thing" exhibition, Raid's show is a vivid and timely testament to the open-ended drift of painting now.