The Trace Absence/ Presence- A Group Exhibition | Page 10

Inside Way Out by Augustus Goertz consists of a dark sphere in the lower left of
the work, surrounded by an amalgamate of silver and grey. The entire painting
has marking running over it and a rough built up mixed media surface, with small
splashes of white paint that dot the piece’s landscape. The sphere feels much
like an entryway into an unknown space—a portal into emptiness. The traces
found elaborating the abstract structure of Inside Way Out tell us that the
efforts of the artist himself are as important to us as the overall image we face.
Mark-making cannot escape its existence as a visible activity, but at the same
time it suggests an abyss surrounding it: the empty space we see in the areas not
taken up with the residue of the tool- brush, pen, or pencil.
Ford Crull, someone who has worked for years on developing an emotionally
communicative, expressive line, offers a series of black-and-white drawings that
are dense and complex exercises in a biomorphic abstraction sensibility that
often form scrawled, fragmentary images that are in a constant state of flux,
never beginning or ending. His gestural lyricism, close to poetry, emphasizes the
high tradition of expressive abstraction here in New York, but it also fits into a
general, geographically non-specific category of visual activity and its sometimes
invisible consequences, as pronounced in the show’s introduction. The suite of
images extends in meaning and power beyond each individual example.
Peggy Cyphers’ luminous abstraction, The Labyrinth, shows us a group of parti-
colored shapes, both rock-like and curvilinear in form, which appear to be
floating in the dead darkness of outer space. This painting is conceptually based
on the movements and turns of the Cretan labyrinth pattern dating back 2,500
years to Crete. The colors, luminous against the black background, owe their
force both to the precise decisions made in the painting of the work, but also in
the arrangement of the objects painted. Here, traces of form are sometimes
overtaken by the dark depths of whatever is behind them. It is not exactly true
that the imagery directly addresses this idea of a picture of remnant strokes and
their environs. Rather, the specificity of the forms interact with inchoate space
in a way that isolates the shapes, making them even more distinct in a black void
they fill.