Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Peter Plagens at Fisher Gallery, USC

Peter Plagens at Fisher Gallery, USC
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Michael Duncan

Although known chiefly as an art critic, Peter Plagens has gained quiet respect over the past 30 years as an abstract painter. Interestingly, his hermetic, rarefied works seem to inhabit a space beyond earshot of his conversational, down-to-earth writerly voice. This retrospective of 35 domestically scaled works, organized by gallery director Selma Holo, connects the dots of a practice whose steady line of logic might not be immediately apparent. From the first, Plagens's thoughtfully conceived abstractions have juxtaposed geometric forms and more painterly atmospheres. Deliberately off-kilter elements coexist in compositions that are elegantly resolved. Cut off from the particularities of everyday reality, the works offer mind-expanding pleasures.

Early paintings are figure/ground experiments. In Kaminev (1975), a cropped disc of flat, greenish-blue acrylic seems to have toppled onto a smeared red oil background. Other paintings from this period present crisply painted open loops that interrupt otherwise empty mottled fields. In An Ethical Decision (1983), layered geometric shapes in variegated colors form the center of a crude cross enclosed in a thinly outlined yellow circle. The contrast of wobbly and sharply rendered forms amounts to a kind of emblem of Plagens's esthetic dialectic.

The modestly philosophical undertones of the compositions become more evident in paintings from the early '90s that feature spindly, asymmetrical forms. In Consciousness Explained (1991), a small, neat, multicolored form that looks like a pie slice floats against a ground of gray and black drippy masses. Three brightly colored lozenges and a colored strip enliven a field of clumsy dollops and brushy Guston-like strokes in Robo #2 (1998). Clean-lined geometries are on a more equal footing with the painterly in several untitled diptychs from 2000 and 2003. Here, brushy overdrawn blob-shapes on the canvases' upper portions vie with neat rectangular arrangements of bright colors below. In two untitled works from 2004, the scribbled elements come into their own with an awkward grace unchallenged by the paintings' smaller, punctiliously drawn polyhedrons.

In his wonderful catalogue essay, Dave Hickey celebrates the purely visual rhythms and harmonies that animate Plagens's "very unfashionable" oeuvre. With their refreshing complexity, these paintings are rigorous brainteasers--and eyeteasers--that explore the convolutions of perceptual experience. [The retrospective traveled to the Capital A+D Gallery at Columbia College, Chicago, and can be seen at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Aug. 7-Oct. 2]

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