Critical Mass., Part I

Before this series: The Chain Letter Show

Jennifer Riley, A Bettor's Dream, 2011, oil on canvas, at Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston

BOSTON--If someone hasn’t come up with Critical Mass. as the name for a blog or magazine about art in Massachusetts, they should. I’m going to use it for several blog posts about the art I'm seeing in the state this summer. I'll have more for you periodically as the season progresses.
 

Jennifer Riley at Carroll and Sons

Jennifer Riley fractures space in her paintings. The geometric abstraction for which she is known—crystalline structures with a landscape sensibility—have evolved into big, graffiti-esque lines that swoop and curve up against the picture plane and then appear to recede into deeper space. Riley fills in the negative spaces so that they become positive, making them dance around and and through the linearity. Smaller pastel drawings at first appear to be channeling Joan Mitchell; up close you see they’re studies for the larger paintings, which nevertheless have a life and identify of their own.

Chromatically and compositionally, the show, A Bettor’s Dream, feels joyous, and Joseph Carroll’s cool, airy installation in light gray walls (which my photographs do not convey well) is a perfect antidote to the summer heat. Artist info here. The exhibition is up through through August 27.

Jennifer Riley, Fire-Fangled Feathers, 2011, oil on canvas, 90 x 66 inches

Installation shot: To the left as you enter the gallery

Below: A gallery image of Eye of the Beholder, 2011, oil on canvas

Below, as you look back toward the entrance

In the gallery's Corner Office Gallery, Damian Hoar de Galvan shows works on paper and sculptures made of scrap materials, both small and the large one you see here. The gallery’s installations shots are great. Check them out, but better still, see the show, I Wish I Had Something to Say. (You’ll find that the artist is visually quite talkative.) Artist info here. The exhibition is up through July 30.

Damien Hoar de Galvan installation view

Nancy Natale at Arden Gallery 

If Nancy Natale is not known to the New York art world she should be. Her small solo show at Arden Gallery on Newbury Street is from a series of recent works called Running Stitch. There’s no thread in these constructed paintings, however. Composed of castoff book parts, rubber strips, metal and other materials, they have been laid out and tacked into assemblages that are equal parts formal beauty and polyrhythmic muscle. If I wanted to be flip I would say that Natale’s work is the love child of Lee Bontecou and El Anatsui. But that would be unfair to an artist who has forged a vision that is quite her own. Artist info here. The exhibition is up through July 30.

Installation view with Some Fell Among the Thorns and Schematic (with sculptures by Anne Lilly)

Full-on view of Some Fell Among the Thorns, 2010, mixed media, 24 x 42 inches

Installation view with Schematic, 2011, and Brought to Tears, 2010, both mixed media

These two paintings were installed on an L-shaped wall. My photographs were not good enough to post, so I've pulled these images from the gallery website

Above: Cinch, 2011, mixed media, 30 x 40 inches

Below: Passing Days, 2011, mixed media, 24 x 24 inches

Critical Mass. will continue sporatically throught the summer. In the next installment, on August 3, we'll go to the Cape Cod Art Museum in Dennis, Mass.