REVIEWS
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Forces to be reckoned with: Painting Made Simple
"Cadmium Arrangement," (2011) oil on canvas by Will Yackulic.
New Yorker Will Yackulic formerly made ornate abstract drawings involving forms evocative of science fiction or cyberworlds, and patterned with repeated typewritten ciphers.
Recently he returned to painting with satisfying results presented at Gregory Lind.
At a loss for subject matter, Yackulic began depicting simple, purposeless structures he made from scrap lumber. What might have served merely as warm-up exercises turned into haunting abstract canvases with an elegiac feeling for bygone futures. Some of his pictures have a time-worn finish.
Thanks to its spooky, moonlike light, "Cadmium Arrangement" (2011) looks one moment like a flatfooted report of dead-end carpentry, the next like one of the "Prouns" of Russian avant-gardist El Lissitzky (1890-1941), recollected from a dream.
Most art historians accept "Proun" as an acronym for a Russian phrase equivalent to "project for affirmation of the new." Lissitzky once defined it as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture."
Yackulic's paintings reawaken something of that abandoned utopian sentiment, while leaving it seeming fatally diminished. But his color sense powers his work more than composition or illusion. His exhibition owes some of its charm to the impression that it shows an artist still in transit to the next "station."