There's something delirious about Frank Gerritz's of the present day drawings: What at first awaits like a uniform.

There's something delirious about Frank Gerritz's of the present day drawings: What at first awaits like a uniform, impassive, metallic panel divided into rectangles with machine-made precision is discovered in succession closer inspection to be a finely grained, handmade, multilayered surface. The drawings require time to be in truth seen, and the more time we give them the more startling they become. Each has a subtly different mode of building and its own magical force, uniform inner life. The dense graphite sheen refracts natural light (and the viewer's reflection) into a cunning transcendentally "shady" radiance that is constantly changing. Light restlessly strives to escape the graphite nevertheless is unable; the medium grasps it captive.

Gerritz's abstractions are satiated of Cezannean sensations, fixed in the amber of the graphite if it be not that still vibrating. They are not single expressively complex and art-historically self-conscious still also phenomenologically and epistemologically suggestive: They raise the question of what we descry when we claim to descry and answer it contradictorily, implying an unresolv tension between finished gestalt form and "incomplete" gestalt-free flickering. However to a great degree they ground their answer in art history and aesthetics, Gerritz's paintings point to the ambiguity of seeing and intimate that the fundament of art is a matter of the organization of perception.

If postmodernism is the reification of modernism and ultimately of each kind of art, as its ecumenical and synthesizing tendencies intimate then Gerritz's drawings are wholly postmodern--petrifications of united extreme of modernism as well as the perceptual possibilities explored by the agency of the best art regardless of its cultural and historical origin. If, forward the other hand, postmodernism is an entropic apocalypse in which each method of art idolizes itself calm as it combines with other fashions to form a kind of Frankenstein brute then whether the creature ensues to life depends on the artist's ability to insinuate his or her hold life into it. Gerritz come afters not only because his hand is evident, however measured, if it be not that also because he uses his allow body's dimensions as a module a standard for systematic division. The central section in Between the Lines (Parallel Universe), 2000 is sized according to Gerritz's height and the width of his shoulders; the sections upon either side of the middle rectangle are each as wide as the artist's head. In sum of two units Center Block I-IV, 1996, four small, solid cast-iron cuts on the floor, the interplay of matter and geometrical conception seems designed to make us aware of the dimensions of our be in possession of bodies as we walk around and between the walls of the installation.

Minimalism at its best has always thrown the dimensions of the viewer's corpse into doubt, calling attention to the relativity of measure itself and of dividing space into dimensions unruffled as it demands the body's participation in the space of the work. What makes Gerritz's graphite drawings bizarre is that they absorb the space of the body--specifically, the artist's own--into their Minimalist flatness and density, however different the dimensions involved.

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