Shining Light
Earlier this year Chuck Close gave some advice to artists during a crisis. "Crisis," he said "shakes out what's going on." This was not all bad; the suspension of expectations and business-as-usual could indeed be liberating. He added, "There is no better time to make paintings than when everybody thinks painting is dead." Ten months later, the GFC continues to send mixed signals; the art market bubbles, deflates, spins; and painting is not dead.
"Shining Light" calls to mind "Hot Nude Pearl," an exhibition Yuill/Crowley mounted more than a decade ago. Devoted, as this one is, to the work of three painters, that earlier exhibition was idiosyncratic and tough, a show, again like this one, governed by the curatorial clarity that has distinguished the gallery from its earliest days. Here, three painters -- Robert MacPherson, Tomislav Nikolic, Nigel Milsom--push painting in ways that owe as much to pleasure and wit as to any modernist interrogation. Prompted by icon painting (Nikolic), photography (Milsom), and conceptualism (MacPherson), the work here breathes, "Crisis? What crisis?"
Ingrid Periz, December 2009