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Review: Tom Lieber at Craig Krull Gallery

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The 14 works in Hawaii-based artist Tom Lieber’s lovely show at Craig Krull Gallery are virtuoso displays of paint-handling. The smallest canvas is barely 8 by 10 inches, while the largest is almost 4 feet square. In either case, Lieber manipulates paint so that it seems to have a life of its own.

Each painting is divided into two color zones, upper and lower, one darker and the other lighter. The zones are visually soft and layered, with under-painting showing through. The paint application is less gestural than atmospheric, like fog banks of shifting color slipping over a landscape.

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Between them, a small storm of meandering, linear paint strokes in multiple, contrasting colors negotiates a transition. Narrow brushes appear to have been rolled between thumb and forefinger or else moved across the surface the way a planchette slides across a Ouija board.

A kind of automatic drawing, these linear tangles make no claim to subconscious revelation, the way Surrealist automatism did. Instead, using only the language of paint, they play with the membranes separating presence and absence, here and there or being and nothingness. It’s like the apparent contradiction inherent in inertia, which is a condition of matter either at permanent rest or moving at a stable velocity along a straight line.

-- Christopher Knight

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Above: Tom Lieber’s ‘Upward’ (2009), oil on canvas. Credit: Craig Krull Gallery

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