New Art Examiner
December 1990
Wade Wilson Gallery

Michael Hoskins
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Michael Hoskin’s new abstractions appear to be a radical departure from his earlier painted, silhouetted figures. Expressing a cooler sensibility than his earlier passionate interiority, these small and elegant unstretched canvases are torn and cut, dyed and painted. Yet they maintain connections with the past works, in that they reveal subtle conceptual and metaphysical references to life processes and his relationships to them.

The interplay of several formal elements in the expanses of these new canvases present allegories for thoughts and feelings about the elusiveness  of life and its ultimate boundaries. Painted or cut squares, symbolizing figures, are situated within a larger torn and raveled linen square. For Hoskins, the squares represent three stations: black, meaning death; white, meaning birth, and brown, meaning the space in between. White squares are created by cutting through the canvas to reveal the white gallery wall. Black squares are the opposite: glossy, think, textured, black acrylic paint tops complex layerings of saturated yellow, red and blue. Tese three colors show through on one or two edges of the black, creating vibrating hairlines. The remaining brown squares are a dilution of the black, in which the colors are allowed to sink into the fabric and intermingle with each other. In each work, a field of fabric, dyed with coffee and tea over a gray gesso resist, locks the three squares in place.

Everywhere, Hoskins sets off dualities in which the formal rules he has created are partially undermined by opposites. Impastoed black squares form literal planes in front of the canvas, while the cut holes physically remove a plane. Flat painting balances textured areas, which are then foils for larger stained, woven fields. Metaphoric and illusionistic space, however, reverses some of the literal planes, so what initially seemed a simple formal juxtaposition becomes more complex. Whie, or emptiness, can also be read as a positive form through the cut canvas, becoming associated in Hoskin’s mind with creation or birth. The black square, too, punches a hole in the canvas, burying itself; yet its gloss and textural physicality brings it back to the surface. While the squares always retain their conceptual form, diagonal, jagged lines break up some of their geometry.

Rather than expressing his earlier anxieties and fears about life and death, these works diagram them. In previous works his single, alienated, tightly controlled, and rigid figures were locked in highly unstable relationships. Now reduced to geometric forms and multiplied, his figures admit new spatial options and become open to new associations. His stained fields become environments, open for interpretation or for internal movement. Particularly interesting is his Recherche Estate Reposed, in which stains connote cloud forms flowing above and around a black sections square, which, because of its shape, placement, and texture, suggests the earth. The white and painted areas become openings for spiritual entry as they float and move back and forth through the canvas.

Beautiful, impassioned but no longer angst-ridden, Hoskin’s new canvases display an underpinning of conceptual and spritual processes which reveal themselves aesthetically. Balance and movement, color and form, are there to be seen in these works, but their conviction lies in the spiritual and intellectual processes which guid their creation.

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.