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Stephen Ellis at Von Lintel
Art in America, Nov, 2006 by Susan Harris
Demonstrating a new degree of freedom within a self-imposed matrix of abstract painting rules, Stephen Ellis's recent exhibition of seven new paintings marked the artist's shift toward the baroque. The show followed a somber series Ellis did two years ago as a response to 9/11 in which he inserted and embedded fragments of texts about loss and death within precisely articulated geometries of horizontal and vertical bands. The cursive shapes of the letters in those elegiac paintings came out of the swirling brushstrokes Ellis had introduced in the mid-'90s, which, together with blurred passages of paint, served as foils to the emphatically flat, geometric grids of color that are the jumping-off points of his work. Having thus literalized the poetry that has characterized his work since the late '80s, Ellis has now chosen to take on a hotter palette, and an overall surface activity of decisively looser and more expressive painterly gestures than ever before.
As with the historical Baroque, Ellis's new paintings exhibit a heightened visual and psychological dynamism and tension. The crisp geometric grids that had previously been dominant formal structures are now subtle and elusive, and are submerged beneath layers of fluid, painterly gesture. The calligraphic component of his work, meanwhile, has metamorphosed into ghostly, rhythmic wavelike lines evoking the spiraling bodies and flowing drapery of Bernini.
In Untitled (SEVL-05-8), Ellis's coursing ribbons span a freely painted rectangular field of fiery orange, which hovers over three crisply ruled diagonal bands of yellower orange on an aqueous ground of indeterminate depth, through which can be detected whispers of red horizontal bands and thin white lines. A diaphanous brushstroke on the left culminates in a painterly flourish from which drips of paint fall to the bottom edge of the canvas. Superimposed on this lyrical composition is a sharply delineated squarish form, its interior of dense blue-black and white paint strokes suggesting a photograph--and a window onto other temporal and spatial dimensions. In this and in all of the other works in the show, Ellis manipulates the constituent parts of his painting program with an exciting openness and force.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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