Darrell
Nettles: Broken Verse
Thomas
Jaeckel
532 W. 25th St., (917) 701-3338
Through July 3
ENLARGE
‘When You Look at Me’ (2014)
by Darrell Nettles.PHOTO: DARRELL
NETTLES
Darrell
Nettles’s paintings, gallery press materials say, “are ergodic in the
deepest and most satisfying sense of the word.” Ergodic is a math/physics term
indicating a system that operates over both time and space. Applied to the
handsome, elegantly ordered letter-and-word pictures of Mr. Nettles (b. 1948),
it seems to mean that the viewer is intended to appreciate them both spatially
as paintings and sequentially, as texts to be read.
In terms of
the former, the artist does a fine—actually, a refined—job. “When You Look
at Me” (2014), at 82 by 60 inches one of the two big paintings in the show, is
as dignified as a diplomat’s three-piece suit. Two smaller near-abstractions
with partial letter shapes incised in thick white or black paint are more
vigorously arresting.
The
exhibition slumps a little in the midsize panels (about 3 feet high by 2 feet
across) with sprayed-and-masked-off whole words. In them, the painting quotient
is less, the poetry part greater. The poetry is conventionally abstruse, but not
much more than that.
Peter Plagens