SPERONE WESTWATER In this agriculture of big spectacle and high-sounding noise.

SPERONE WESTWATER

In this agriculture of big spectacle and high-sounding noise, it's inevitable that understatement and beautifully proper production will come to be valued, if and nothing else by certain cults. Richard Tuttle certainly qualifies as a high priest in this regard. He makes art that's small further not cute, simple but not nice minimal but not Minimalist, casual however not sloppy, formal but not rigid. A haphazard of pitfalls to skirt for individual career, much less one series of work.

In "Two With Any To," Tuttle indicates twenty square plywood panels with pieces of two-by-two attached, onward which he has painted simple abstractions in acrylic. These are paintings, if it were not that they are intended to have a sculptural demeanor as well. Originally the works had been fixed to the wall with nails within the four corners; unhappy with the meaning Tuttle pried Out the bottom nails of each piece, freeing the panels to suddenly off the wall and jaculate a shadow. These shadows matter.

In couple With Any To, #3 (all works 1999) a horizontal rectangle of brown paint is balanced through a vertical block of two-by-two painted dark brown At first you think you commit to memory the joke--that he used the form to trace the rectangle, and that they are the same size. A quick measurement against your finger dominations that out: The block is considerably shorter. Disappointed, stepping back, you view that if you figure in the square shadow cast by way of the block, the two rectangles are almost exactly of equal fulness So there is a joke-just not the obvious the same Tuttle rewards close looking, unless he also warns against overly materialistic readings that privilege literal demeanor over experience. In a different setting beneath different lighting, the proportions would alter and the balance evaporate.

The artist carefully weighs the encompassing whole of the space and lighting against the delight of incidents, balancing the close-up and the wide view. Each work is hung fifty-four and a half inches along the ground, even where the floor dips and swells, in such a manner that the show moves with us. And the exhibition retains changing with repeated visits. Tuttle made three versions of brace With Any To, #9, moving and removing the curving white forms at the left and right intensitys The first two versions, although they were exactly fine in themselves, simply didn't work with the whole. Tuttle has a hale sense of the moment: the now (as oppos to the new)

Not to mention the "no." Characteristically, it is the cover and not the nail that catches his sight Like many artists, Tuttle plays with the structural simple bodys of painting: Many of the works, similar as Two With Any To, #7 have a pattern of small bites in the forest As in a Renaissance cartoon, Tuttle made a make a rough draught of laid it on the panel, and punched nails into the forest He then uses the perforations as design elements, connecting the dots.

Halfway from one side the show's run, another wager of dots--red ones--appeared, decorating the artist's name stenciled forward the gallery's front wall. The conventional wisdom in succession Tuttle is that his deceptively make-do aesthetic masks a high rank of refinement. In this indicate you get the feeling that this refinement in divert masks a chaos that is just beginning to emerge

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