REVIEWS

Mel Prest: Alignments
chrisashley.net
June 28, 2006

Mel Prest's paintings are pictorial and physical, visually rich and optically complex, sensual and emotional, and engage the viewer in evocative experiences of time and place. In the paintings shown in an exhibition called Alignments at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco April 4-29, 2006, there was much work evident in both sense of the word: many pieces of art, and lots of labor and time invested.

One constant among the paintings are painted lines of mostly uniform width. These lines are the width of the brush used to make the line; in a sense, the lines themselves are actually strokes. The lines are hand-painted, and slightly wobbly or tremulous. The surfaces of many of the paintings comprise a field of either vertical or horizontal lines and lines continue onto a painting's side. These painted lines are drawing, carriers of color, indicators of direction, and become the painting's image. As an example, Ladder (2006), an installation of twenty two panels hung high on the wall in two aligned columns of eleven panels each, making a single work measuring 112 x 13 x 2 inches overall. The panels subtly change color in a gradation from very pale blue at the bottom to a dark blue gray at the top. Thin painted lines span the surface of each panel's front and continue around to the sides, ending at the wall.

In relation to Prest's work one might immediately think of painters whose work is highly optical, such as Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely or Richard Anuskiewicz. But Prest's work isn't optical for the sake of optics in quite the way these three artists might be thought; her work is warmer and softer, more about place and seeing, time and breathing. One might think of the systems or processes of Sol Lewitt and Josef Albers but Prest's intentions are not diagram-matic or schematic. Perhaps in terms of light one might think of Mark Rothko, but Prest's paintings are more crisp and intimate rather than gestural and heroic. I mention Agnes Martin not because of any grid-based relationship, but rather because of an attitude of paying attention at a slow rate of speed; Martin does this with restraint and dryness, while Prest's paint has body and is lustrous. It might seem a reach to invoke Caspar David Friedrich or Albert Bierstadt, but I think one can find in Prest's work these two painters' qualities of light and air, luxurious nature, and relaxed wonder. I would call this Romanticism. There are four key characteristics of these paintings on which I'd like to focus: Time & Place, Order, The Wall and Recovery.

Time & Place: Prest creates mood and space through a deft and confident control of color. Colored fields and lines shift subtly across a panel, or from panel to panel. Occasionally, color may suddenly make a huge transitional leap from one hue or value to another that pulls the eye along, making a painting feel like a time-based experience of a specific but unnamable location. The hand-painted, evenly spaced colored lines are precisely placed, but contain the presence of human movement. Some paintings depict and feel like the space and light of landscape, while others look and feel more urban or structured, perhaps architectural. One might say that Pale Dusk is the fading light along the Pacific coast, that Black Rainbow is urban nighttime, or that the colored lines building a vibrant concentration of luminous blue with a hint of rose in Twin Rainbow represent several moments during a brilliant spring day. The range and control is impressive, and the results are varied and surprising.

Order: Prest's paintings are structured in parts and wholes. Physically, multiple panels are smaller parts of a single larger piece, although this work is not modular because each piece has its specific place; parts are not interchangeable. Drawing and composition are sequential progressions- lines accumulate and build progressive transitions across surfaces that create movement and changes in light. Symmetry is hinted at or implied, but also disrupted because not strictly adhered to, making the seeing experience non-static. Color makes light, and structured, orchestrated, gradated color makes a pictorial kind of light. Together line and color create a visual sense of place and atmosphere. Each painting's making is at least superficially evident: there is a background color on top of which colored lines are painted. These are paintings made in steps; while one might assume there is a plan, they actually feel intuitive. Regarding the paintings that are composed of vertical lines, the label stripes might be used, but the range of color and the hand-painted qualities prevents this somewhat restrictive reading. The paintings are more complex than conveyed by a description of how they are made.

The Wall: The painted lines continue onto the painting's edge. Looked at straight-on as a flat plane while ignoring the sides there is the implication that a painting is a detail of a larger continuous image. But paintings on which the lines continue onto the side call our attention to the fact that the painting is an object, a shallow rectangular box. Given this, the viewer must consider whether these lines wrap around to the back of the painting and are constrained to this painted object (either actually or inferred), or if what is being suggested, or pictorially hinted at, is that the lines continue into the wall. In the latter case, a painting like Ladder hints at the possibility that the lines continue off the edge of the painting; the lines in Ladder seem to transfer a kind of energy into or pressure onto the wall on which it hangs, not only making the wall an essential part to the painting, but also imaginatively implying that the wall itself has pictorial possibilities as an extension of the painting. These imagined continuous lines simultaneously anchor the painting to the wall and exert a kind of force that seems to lift the painting off the wall. In contrast, the horizontal and vertical patterning on the nine-panel The Things that are Missing contains the lines within each panel, so that the role of the wall is as a container of or buffer to the painting's energy.

Recovery: An initial, superficial encounter with Prest's work might create an immediate reaction to and assumptions about her work as decoration, but with even a bit of close looking it quickly becomes clear that her work goes far beyond this. I think her paintings can work on both levels without compromise- isn't all painting in some way decoration?- which I think is a real achievement. What is interesting is how her work seems to flirt with ways of making paintings that have descended to the level of cliche and kitsch, but have now been made extremely viable.

In the late sixties and seventies, many popular forms of "abstract" art for mass consumption as installation or murals came into use. At the same time, artists less-schooled in history and theory that used geometric form and line, and multiple panels. Much of this work is made in response to a misunderstanding of the work of, for example, Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. For this viewer, Prest's paintings revive, work against, and overcome a form of decorative public art that rapidly became cliche in the late 20th century. For example, during this period it was quite common to find that the lobbies, hallways, and parking lots in North America and elsewhere contained enormous wall-sized, patterned abstract images, typically in earth colors, often consisting of parallel, straight, and arcing lines in gradated colors. Another example was the use of printed, patterned fabric stapled to a stretcher and hung on the wall like a painting. Other common techniques and materials employed by the amateur painter of the period was the use of wood panels, flat color, modular units that could be hung in various configurations, and painted sides of the canvas. Common issues with this art include a failure to go beyond design to compositionally address the rectangle; a lack of understanding of color dynamics; a crude handling of paint; a failure to understand paintings as a highly visual and physical medium; and an attitude that defaulted to thinking of paintings as merely personal expression and/or decoration without a responsibility to the medium and to history. Prest easily succeeds in addressing all of these areas, which is why I state, to repeat from above, that her "paintings revive and recuperate the use of modularity in abstract painting which was debased by populist misunderstandings during the late 1960's and early 1970's of modern or minimalist art as public art or decoration."

Conclusion: A good painter gives the viewer something worth looking at. The painter must present the viewer with something intelligent and thoughtful, which the viewer can recognize and experience. And while meeting certain expectations the painter also wants and needs to surprise the viewer. Prest does all of this. The conceptual basis of her work is sound and consistent and resolved. She fully considers every aspect of making a painting, from size, surface, and edge to color, paint quality, and effect. The paintings are beautiful, and they reward the viewer's investment of time and looking. The paintings are surprising, not only because of her use of what might have been an outmoded way of making a painting, but because the image and mood of each is so unique and specific.

• EXHIBITION: Mel Prest - Alignments