Titus O.

The North Texas art scene continues to buzz, with the plethora of new galleries that opened in Dallas last year appearing to flourish, while working out some of the kinks. Road Agent’s recent show of drawings by the artist M. was excellent, and sold out. Art Prostitute has renovated their space, changed the gallery name to the Public Trust, and continues to well represent the graphic/design/pop art front. Kenny Goss has been on a global spending spree, buying up every available piece of significant recent British art on the market in order to launch the Goss-Michael Foundation, a non-profit devoted to that particular niche. Cynthia Mulcahy and Gerald Peters galleries are moving by the start of the fall season. The list goes on…

Marty Walker‘s latest offering is a solid testament to the viability of American abstract painting, and one of her best shows to date. The three artists are all Texas-based, and give further hope that Dallas needn’t be relegated to artistic also-ran status.

Mark Flood is mostly a terrible colorist. You sometimes get the sense that, like a kid, he just grabs the brightest tubes out of the box (hopefully in some kind of metallic fluorescent,) and makes a dominantly blue one, a green one, a red one, and a yellow one, while mashing in blobs of just about everything else in as obnoxious a way possible. And believe it or not, it totally works here. He’s retreated to a smaller scale, and maintains a single inquiry, pushing the figurative approach introduced in his last show much further, while keeping it straightforward and focused (if as chromatically challenging as ever.) The surfaces are rich, the beings inhabiting them varied and nuanced. I love these pieces, and find them at once hilarious, evocative, discordantly musical, and totally winning.

Jeff Elrod has recently joined the growing Marfa artist enclave, and his three small pieces here are a subtle counterpoint to Flood’s onslaught. He continues to explore the interface between computer drawing and the most traditional painting approach, meticulously crafting hard-edge, pixilated abstract figures on linen. Their simplicity lends them an impact that belies their means, and they converse knowingly with late modern masters like Ryman, Marden, Mangold, and Lewitt.

Jeff Zilm doesn’t necessarily steal the show, but his ominous black monochromes are new to me, and it’s a powerful introduction. He paints them using the emulsion stripped off 35 mm movie prints, and subtitles the paintings after the films now seen in ghostly transfiguration. They maintain a strange essence of their origins; maybe it’s just my imagination, or perhaps it’s because the artist is somehow channeling them. In “Untitled (The Fat and the Lean),” a painted frame overlays the image, as if the projector tracking has slipped. “Untitled (The Pilgrim)” is as commanding as Chaplin in the original, and somehow for just a wash of silvery black pigment on canvas, it has nearly as much presence. At a time when much is being made of celluloid preservation, Zilm’s creation-through-destruction makes a fascinating counterpoint, with profound philosophical, even metaphysical implications.