Art News recommended by Yong Chen : The paintings in Mary Heilman's recent exhibition--her first at 303

Mary Heilman at 303
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Joe Fyfe

The paintings in Mary Heilman's recent exhibition--her first at 303--are, as usual, cheery, infantile and subtly resigned. Heilman could be our best abstract painter. She remains alert to what permutations are available within her deliberately limited repertoire and is immune to gratuitous stylistic development. Heilman's work has another ingredient sorely missing from most contemporary painting: modesty. She hides how smart she is.

In Baby Snake (2004), for example, Heilman coated a 40-by-32-inch canvas with black and then laid down a deceptively complex flagstonelike pattern with masking tape. After various greens were painted over the surface, she pulled the tape off, letting the resulting green bleeds partially fill up the black interstices. The painting's elegant, slithery movement--it looks like a diamondbacked reptile going by a window--is counterpointed by studiedly offhand execution.

Heilman is also the most French of American painters in her ease with tradition, most apparent in the playful relationship to rational structure, which she subsumes in layers of bright paint. Also French is her lack of sentimental attachment to painting culture. Brice Marden and Howard Hodgkin come to mind as examples of artists whose work has sometimes faltered because of an overwhelming sense of responsibility to painting's history. Heilman eschews the idea that a masterpiece is lurking in pigmented substances and maintains the pose of a lightweight. She utilizes a generic modernism made up of stock visual conventions: triangular vectors, multicolored bands, checkerboards. The titles come from easily identifiable sources (here, two derived from Bob Dylan songs). Even the least characteristic, most seemingly traditional work, the Turner-like Heaven (2004), with its steamily verdant light-viridian-to-putty greens and its drippy curlicues of hot white paint, is a bit of a put-on.

Heilman flirts more closely with illusionism in Heaven than in any other work, but the flourishes of feathery brushstrokes are belied by the deadness of the paint. Heilman treats it quite literally like sloppy wet stuff. She makes broad, impatient cross wipes with large round bristle brushes or covers flat areas by plopping paint over a large portion that ends up looking like a wet bathing suit.

This matter-of-fact quality is, in part, the result of Heilman's formative years in New York, where she encountered anti-illusionist sculptors Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark. Smithson's sculpture, Asphalt Rundown (1969), for example, where a dumptruck unloaded liquid macadam down a hill, is probably behind her almost abject acceptance of how gravity affects a liquid substance applied to a vertically mounted picture. Similarly, Matta-Clark's sawed cuts in abandoned buildings point to how much Heilman's canvases and supports are treated like objects: she paints the sides of most of her works. The crevices that appear in the removed-tape areas, like the ones in Baby Snake, go around the painting much like the cuts through the corners in a Matta-Clark house. Also, when Heilman executes a diptych, of which there were several in this show, she leaves a wide gap between the two components, stretching the unity of the ensemble toward the snapping point.

Once again, Heilman has clarified that abstract painting in our time is a game for artists who like tough-minded fun. Her sensuous paintings are tempered by a tired, knowing irony and embody all the callous charm of our era.

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