Catalogue Essay
Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, March 4 – April 19,1997
Rockford Art Museum, May 2 – July 13, 2997 
Bradley University, Peoria, IL, August 25 – October 4, 1997

Beauty and the Three
Works by Judith Geichman, Gordon Powell, Ben Dallas
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Through paintings and painted sculptures, Judith Geichman, Gordon Powell, and Ben Dallas use abstraction as a way of gaining insight and creating a dialogue as participants in the world, both as human beings and as artists. Although abstract art is usually regarded as a style that is primarily grounded, historically and theoretically, in the modernist terms of formal innovation and utopian idealism, abstraction itself is also a mode of thought. It is a way of ordering the unknowable (in religion, poetry, and literature) or of systematizing the world into intelligible, predictable elements (in philosophy, science, and mathematics). As a visual system of contemplation, abstract art opens up new worlds for those sensitive to its messages. In order to operate as a process of thinking, however, it must be freed from modernist restrictions in signification and subject matter.

As they jettison such constraints on abstraction’s conceptualizing power, these three abstract artists work from individual aesthetic interests to exercise this freedom, developing processes and techniques initiated from modernism in addition to a broader history of painting and sculpture. Rather than foregrounding formalism as meaning itself, they share the desire to utilize it more broadly to widen and deepen their subject matter.

Both Ben Dallas’ paintings and Gordon Powell’s sculptures are characterized by clear and concise structures, which are covered with amorphous, sensually painted surfaces. Such contradictory methodological elements of “order vs disorder” and “exquisite physicality” vs. “distanced, conceptual rigor” imply psychological dimensions as well. Powell’s constructions are made of layered strips of wood with a mortarlike filling. Their interiors are painted in warm colors and buffed to create glowing surfaces which communicate the containment, safety, and sensuality associated with home. Exteriors are left unpainted, thus revealing their manufacture, and indicating an openness and interactivity between the interior personal space and its more public setting. Pointing elsewhere, the contradictions underlying Dallas’ works serve to question whether cognition is really an impersonal process and whether ideas can ever be pure or separated from the materiality of the body. His shaped paintings intend to convey through their rigid, geometric structures, stenciled and flat surfaces, repetition of forms, and nonobjective sources, an impersonal and distanced cognition. However, undermining these distancing elements is the integration of rich, sensual surfaces with their supporting, distinctively shaped, three-dimensional structures.

Judith Geichman’s desire to reflect upon and externalize experience is enacted mainly through painterly means: in lush, brushy, surfaces, unexpected textures (including loosely applied “skins” of paint), and interrelating lines and masses of color. Readable as formal relationships operating at the surface, her paintings’ rectangular supports and diptych configurations reaffirm their status as pictures, while the line formed by their juxtaposition becomes an active border that either stops or permits movement. Yet, as they hint at atmospheric depth in landscape and organic forms moving through space, another realm of lived experience is evoked. As one’s eyes roam over her paintings, one is drawn deeply into them, initially becoming lost, then emerging, regrouping, and again plunging inside, thus discovering more places, paths, and emotions to apprehend.

Thus, each artist pursues a shared set of concerns regarding the permeable boundaries between painting and sculpture and with stretching the formal possibilities of their materials and surfaces. Their abstractions are ways of confronting and, perhaps, controlling personal experiences and perspectives, as they work to balance the alternating dissolution and resolution that parallels life.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.