ARTnews

MICHAEL KESSLER

Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe

by Richard Speer

    Few painters wax more poetically than Michael Kessler about the ongoing duel between Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos.  The Manichean battle of human aspiration versus natural decay takes center stage in the artist’s works, played out in obsessive but never tiresome variations on the same basic schema.

    In Shifting Strides, Kessler, a 1990 Rome Prize winner, continued his well-honed superimposition of squares and rectangles atop luxuriantly layered organic backgrounds, shot through with arcing spurts of acrylics, varnishes, and gesso.

Depending on the interplay of materials, some works finish glossy, others waxy; some layers recede into muted planes, while others sear forth as if barely containing some preternatural incandescence.  It is an unlikely updating of Hans Hofmann, this skillfully modulated push-and-pull between the polar drives to surmount nature and to surrender to it.  The end products of this dialectic process come across rather like a painterly version of the last scene in Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, toppled and overgrown with vines.  Kessler’s ruins are his immaculate geometries, cancer-eaten by lichen-like tendrils that spread across and penetrate into the thickly built-up paint.  There is something poignant in this.

Chromatically, Kessler has long enjoyed the alchemy between black and red, and Shifting Strides proved no exception.  Twinkling, jewel-like works such as Offside I and II and the larger Kalli exult in the interplay of onyx and ruby tones.  But recently the artist has ventured into thrilling greens—grading his Infield from chartreuse to kelly to forest—and blues—using Narita and Fishpond as springboards from which to explore cerulean and ultramarine, navy and midnight.  Kessler seems to feed off of intense saturation; when he departs from it, as in the less exhilarating ecru etudes Downstream and Grapevine, he loses his bearings.  It is as if he senses that in the great battle his work chronicles, nature always wins; the best man can do is live—and paint—with intensity.  Let us eat, drink, and be colorful, the paintings beseech us, for tomorrow we die.

—Richard Speer
(Unedited plain-text version)

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