SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
ART CRITIC
Denzil Hurley, Gillian Theobald and Susan Dory are Seattle partisans of a fluid kind of abstraction. Silky and sly, it flirts with and then tries to deny various kinds of representation.
Hurley at the James Harris Gallery is the most lush and yet most remote of the three. Working small with oils on canvas glued to board, he has reduced tones to dots and given them painterly fields in which to reverberate.
These jittery dots engage each other, or when presented alone, engage the implication of shadows around them. Above all, they engage their surroundings, which are cloudy and richly atmospheric.
Some say Hurley's search for elementary purity is, at this late date, absurd. Early in the last century, Kasimir Malevich took abstraction as far as it could go and then backed away. For him, purity was possible before Stalin, and not after.
After Malevich, not to mention Robert Ryman and James Turrell, we know purity can't be found in abstractions, which inevitably betray their dependence on the world of the senses.
And that's what makes Hurley's abstractions powerful. Contrary to the claims of their critics, his paintings freely acknowledge the task assigned them is beyond their abilities. Yellows shining in yellow fields are abstractions, yes, but they are also suns moving within the sun, and his blackened dots in creamy whites are anchors that keep the sky from drifting away. Even as they acknowledge this, they deny it. Contradictions this obvious are meant to contain multitudes.
What they don't have is the least hint of sentimentality or expressionistic indulgence. Maybe that's as close to purity as Hurley is going to get.
Gillian Theobald at Linda Hodges works best large in oils, at least 40 inches high by 60 inches wide. In the current show are rectangular pairs of her canvases hung together in contrasting tones.
"Day & Night (Evergreen)" is frosted blue coupled with stale peach, cool and warm colors that play with their stereotypes. By themselves, they'd be effective as hipper, less heartfelt versions of Anne Appleby.
But that's just the beginning. At the painting's bottom is the hint of treetops, rendered as lumpy shadows. They activate the space with their ungainly energy, pulling the rug out from under the hip tones above them.
In other paintings, there is sometimes a low horizon line, a tide pool, a forest or lake. They are felt more than seen. Theobald isn't painting images, she's painting the fading memory of images. Even at their most ghostly, they knock her abstract fields off their pedestals.
Susan Dory at Howard House used to be a pattern painter. In her work could once be seen a string of lumpy hearts and droopy diamonds liberated from playing cards, Islamic calligraphies on the skids, figure-8 loops and daisy chains.
Her new work is more abstract but looser, with line and color, form and shadow, engaging in a supple, free play by means of wax and oil paint.
To say these small paintings are beautiful doesn't do them justice. They are also tough in the Anges Martin vein, but with a bouncy, comic undertone. Rarely have baby blues and pearly pinks had this much backbone.
P-I Art Critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattle-pi.com