Coast to Coast Geographic alliance underscores this exhibition of painting and Conceptualist sculpture at Barry Whistler Gallery. Showing in the front room of the gallery space are the paintings and works on paper by the Texas and Southwest artists Emi Winter and Mark Williams and works on paper by the East Coast artist Adam Raymont. In the adjacent room are several small- to medium-sized sculptures constructed out of translucent tissue paper and balsa wood by the West Coast artist Robert Wilhite. Winter's diamond-shaped canvases in glittery blue, black and white, "Blue Diamond I & II," are a powerful presence in the front room, especially vis-à-vis the surrounding fainter works on paper. Facing her paintings are the shiny polyurethane surfaces of Mark Williams. In the works "Looking Forward" and "Move Closer," Williams has painted glossy orthogonal swatches of orange, brown, mauve and green. Between the colors one sees evidence of paint layered beneath. The contrast between layered under-surfaces and flat, glossy top-surfaces creates a provocative tension. Raymont's drawings on vintage paper are precious but pleasingly not pretty. Hung from ceiling and wall alike in the adjacent room, Wilhite's paper-wood sculptures are inspired by the Seven Wonders of the World. In Wilhite's hands, the Colossus of Rhodes is transformed into a model glider-esque version of Sputnik I. The small chair on the wall, "Throne of Zeus," is a droll interpretation of the Statue of Zeus. Being good ego-centered Dallasites, we might think that the source of Wilhite's "Tower of Babel" cantilevering from the wall is the late Philip Johnson's white ziggurat located downtown in Thanksgiving Square at Ervay and Bryan. The inspiration for this piece, however--and probably Johnson's hardy kitsch-monument as well--is the mythic tower of Babylonian wonder. While the pieces in Coast to Coast are good, they suffer from sterile installation. The staunch separation of sculpture from painting and works on paper does a disservice to the individual pieces. Creative adjacencies, such as the placement of Wilhite's "Throne of Zeus" next to Raymont's "Green Things" or Winter's "Blue Diamond I" next to Wilhite's "Sputnik," would have brought out unforeseen qualities that lie latent within the work. Through March 26 at Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909 Canton St., 214-939-0242. (C.T.)
Erwin Redl Erwin Redl is an artist best known for working in the medium of light. In 2002 he wrapped the Whitney Museum in New York in red and blue drapes of light-emitting diodes, or LED. The work showing at Conduit that most closely corresponds to this is the series of small pencil and ink drawings in red and dark blue on the wall facing the entryway. More than flickering lights hung on a building in three dimensions, however, these drawings bring to mind the "international picture language" of 1936 designed by Otto Neurath, an Austrian like Redl, or the round-headed stick-bodies on skis and luges that the German Otl Aicher designed for the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. On neighboring walls are eight almost monochromatic drawings with circles and lines at the center of each. They are larger and, with cracked and scratched surfaces, far more expressionistic than the colored drawings. Redl explains that, in these drawings, he is working through the architectural tactics that the hanging of lights involves without having to perform the full-fledged installation. In these terms, Redl has cleverly reinvented the architectural rendering as something far more abstract, symbolic and, indeed, conceptual in a new way. The best part of this showing of Redl's work is what is to follow. In December of this year, Conduit will host a large LED installation by Redl. Through March 26 at Conduit Gallery, 1626-C Hi Line Drive, 214-939-0064. (C.T.)
Frank Stella: Painting in Three Dimensions For what Frank Stella's large and raucous sculpture from the 1980s lacks in formal triumph, it makes up for in revealing the complexity of the artist's rocky road of development. Having made seminal paintings in the late '50s and an array of more successfully bombastic sculpture in the late '90s, Stella shows that losing one's creative mojo is not the end of the world--it can return just as easily as it departed. Exhibited in the basement gallery of the Nasher, the jauntily colored tangles of aluminum and fiberglass are the results of Stella's continued transfiguration of the Greenbergian dictum on modernism and medium specificity. With its brightly colored multidimensional layers of steel bolted together and hung on the wall, "Diepholz II" (1982) hovers somewhere between painting and sculpture. The problem is not so much with the equivocation of the piece but rather with its cup-runneth-over bluster. It's too colorful, unbalanced and comes across as intellectually vapid. Far different from the sculpture are the prints, the "Sinjerli Variations" (1977). Containing color diffused by white lines, the offset circles of these prints are much more convincing than the screaming and jagged forms of the painting-cum-sculpture that similarly hang on the walls. Through April 3 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., 214-922-1200. Reviewed this week. (C.T.)
