Karin Davie at Mary Boone - New York - exhibit of new paintings - Brief Article

The art public has long appreciated images, motifs or inflections of style that are easily recognizable as "belonging" to only one artist. Pollock provided it with his endlessly elastic drip, Lichtenstein with the all-invading benday dot and Peter Halley through his fluorescent "cell with circuits." New York painter Karin Davie has found her signature gesture in the brightly colored ribbons that she has now fine-tuned to perfection. She seemingly arrived at this motif through combining the fluid, effortless-looking brushwork of late de Kooning with the luminosity and joyful energy that can be found in Morris Louis.

Using a wide, soft brush, Davie applies her diluted oil paint wet on wet, in swooping curvilinear gestures that measure the entire height and width of the canvas. The gestures in the vertically formatted Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated #3 (90 by 78 inches) resemble cross sections of large, rolling waves stacked one on top of the other. (The paintings in this show, all 2002, are identically titled but individually numbered.) In this painting, Davie's red, pink, white, blue, yellow and green bands contract and expand with ease, creating the illusion of deep space toward the center of the composition. It looks as if these dynamic loops that seem barely contained by the width of the canvas could go on forever.

Davie challenges notions of originality by nearly duplicating the rhythms of #3 in painting #6 and by multiplying them in the shorter and wider pictures, #2 and #5. Finally, in #4, a similar wave pattern is tilted 90 degrees, thereby achieving a different order of Baroque exuberance within a horizontal composition.

Like Color Field painting, Davie's optically dazzling, playfully psychedelic paintings are open to the charge of being about nothing more than retinal pleasure. They are virtuosic and splendidly superficial; great, luscious caramels that have been sucked to the point that their hues begin flowing into one another.

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