Christopher Deeton at ATM - New York

Christopher Deeton's first solo show in New York consisted of mostly small paintings in industrial enamel on aluminum and a group of drawings in ink on paper. The drawings are from the mid-'90s, the paintings from 2001 and 2002. All the works are abstract.

Deeton's new works might be described as reductive minimalism for those who don't like reductive minimalism. His titles--Aurora Glow or Garden of Monks, for example--confirm a poetic dimension. The former is a small painting on aluminum (20 by 15 inches, 2001) composed of gray close-knit vertical striations that fill much of the panel's surface; they dissolve into a series of points in a broad upper zone of pearly dark blue; at the bottom are more jagged rhythms, in a narrower band of gray and blue. The painting, with its subtle, refrigerated hues, is an open-ended essay on the exigencies of working small-scale and intensely.

Also in a painterly minimalist vein is Distant Realm (24 by 18 inches, 2002), which echoes Aurora Glow in its format--white, this time dripping over black, with a foresty trim at the top and charcoal gray above it. Ossian (24 by 18 inches, 2002), extends the general sense of northland drama with its silvers, grays and whites, its heroic painting style and the frigid beauty of it all.

Garden of Monks (30 by 22 inches, 1994), on the other hand, has a more complex composition and exemplifies the drawing series; its tripartite structure has the impact of a monumental triptych, though it, too, is a small work done in corrosive browns and blacks in ink on paper. Deeton made trips to areas in Brittany containing megaliths, with his father-in-law, the late painter Paul Georges, who maintained a studio in France. The resulting works are dark, looming and mystical. Other pieces from this drawing series included Kercadoret and Kerlescan (both 1994), also redolent of the primeval.

Deeton seems to be addressing new formal concerns, new coloristic values and new, extra-artistic subject matter in a big, horizontal, 28-by-80-inch, red-on-red painting titled Endless Endless (2002). The first influence that comes to mind is Morris Louis: this is stripe painting with a vengeance, less florid than Louis's, perhaps, but almost as romantic. The stripes seem to be dripping up from the bottom and down from the top, with edges in lighter red on two sides and top. Here, Deeton seems to be seeking a cosmic metaphysics that is decidedly Endless Endless.

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