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Monique Prieto at Cheim & Read
Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Stephen Maine
In departing abruptly from the vocabulary of abutting, eccentric shapes for which she is known, Monique Prieto has apparently decided that it is time for a change, and it is not hard to agree. Likable enough, the earlier work consisted of animated, rambling or bunched forms, each in a single, usually chipper hue, looming over, sidling up to or otherwise engaging one another in a stridently flat, airless space. These shapes were drawn on a computer and transferred to canvas but had less to do with software than with hardware, as Prieto found drawing with a computer mouse a useful procedure. The artist deserves credit for acknowledging that the results, based on a process that might be endlessly repeated, were growing stale.
Establishing contours and filling in colors resembles the sign-painter's technique, and the artist's new paintings are, in fact, text-based. Acrylic-on-canvas and dated 2005, they feature evocative phrases lifted from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the ambitious 17th-century English bureaucrat and naval administrator whose descriptions of governmental machinations and the minutiae of daily life are uncommonly vivid. Rendered in clunky letters, as if made of rough blocks or slabs varying widely in size, the words are given a rudimentary illusion of depth by means of black borders at the top and right of each character. There is a little conceptual sizzle in the realization that the shapes constituting the letters--the ostensible subject of the painting--are the only untouched areas of canvas. The traces of paint clinging to the letterforms sometimes read as candy-colored mortar, sometimes like an aura that acts as visual liaison between them and the expansive ground colors.
In the 6-by-11-foot walking, the phrase "WALKING BOTH FORWARDS AND BACKWARDS" lumbers across the canvas in three lines, the characters jostling for position within the confines of the canvas's edges in a manner reminiscent of the earlier, abstract work. The cerulean-lined, orange-yellow ground suggests a legal pad, and the letters are haphazardly outlined in the same cerulean, magenta, ochre and a beautiful, warm gray. That same gray grounds another painting, our eyes, the largest work in the show at 6 by 13 feet. Here, Prieto uncharacteristically blends colors, albeit with a roller; the skylike upper region, looming over "OUR EYES LOOKING IN PARALELL LYNES," shifts haltingly, left to right, from hot pink through mint green to ultramarine. The passage leaps out amid the graphically bold but materially timid paint-handling seen elsewhere in the show, and may signal a far more significant transition in the artist's work than the co-opting of text.
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