"Wendy White at Sixtyseven"

February 2007 by Stephen Maine

Slow to admit the viewer, beguilingly sulky, the four paintings and four sculptures in Wendy White's bracing New York solo debut compel attention for several reasons. In the canvases, which measure 5 or 6 feet by nearly 8 feet, the artist works a vein of scruffy, brushy abstraction that conveys skepticism about the viability of its own vocabulary. Her palette includes rumbling, inflected blacks, chalky and electric tints and scarcely anything in between. She augments her acrylics with spray paint but avoids direct references to graffiti or "street art." And behind her congested compositions lies the promise of zooming, unbound space.

Wendy White: Fruit Refraction, 2006, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 72 x 95 1/4 inches; at Sixtyseven.

A mound becomes a maw in Gapstuff (2005), both a barrier to visual access and a portal through which access may be had. Multicolored bands, applied with a stiff, fat, carefully loaded brush, emerge from the murky blacks. (Howard Hodgkin uses this chromatically complex but tactilely anonymous device to other, more romantic, less toxic ends.) In three paintings dated 2006, the color is cleaner, the compositional decision-making is clearer and more deliberate, and the cramped movement of the brush originates more from the wrist and elbow than from the shoulder. The blacks in Fruit Refraction are alloyed with green, red and magenta, and they gain in depth and complexity in the vicinity of the cheeky squiggle, in spray-painted safety yellow, that fills up and holds down the lower right corner of the canvas. On the left side of Grass Stain, a bristling thicket of curves and spikes yields to undulating, graduated stripes; pinging black and yellow struts on the right buttress the chaos.

Tarry masses structure the contrarily titled Chunk Lite, in which White's palette recalls both the sonorous, black-framed color chords of Max Beckmann and the skittish neon weirdness of Ed Paschke. This churning painting threatens to fall apart, so the artist, in an uncharacteristic failure of nerve, stabilizes it by reiterating the corners with slim, taped-edge wedges of color. But the painting is full of surprises: an inverted blue-on-umber teardrop shape at the bottom center; a glowing bar of color that contains pure white; and wispy, barely legible swipes of the brush that substantiate a scuffed, black void.

White considers herself as much a sculptor as a painter, but the four floor-based works clustered in the middle of the gallery functioned as addenda to the canvases. Steel poles stuck into pails of cement are decked out with fake fruit, Styrofoam and duct tape. Their palette is similar to that of the paintings, and they convey the same sense of plastic investigation and marshaling of visual means. But they are finger exercises compared to the concerti of the paintings. In concealing her virtuosity behind unglamorous color and an unsuave touch, White reveals a different order of virtuosity, deriving compelling effects from blunt, artless means and plumbing the bottomless dichotomies of structure and formlessness, reason and oblivion, scaffolding and swamp.