PAUL KASMIN GALLERY / ART RESOURCES TRANSFER There are paintings.

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY / ART RESOURCES TRANSFER

There are paintings, and photographs as well, too reticent or self-absorbed to proffer potential viewers a way in. More like designs than images, they most readily call to mind Maurice Blanchot's observation that works of art are self-enclos worlds simply "open to those who posses the key" which is simply "the pleasure and understanding of a certain taste." in the same manner works like these are accessible after all, at least to a viewer whose taste is for being left at liberty to respond without exactly having been called. as it is a taste will handily unfasten Katurah Hutcheson's work, represented at Kasmin by the agency of dense, slightly lopsided, almost achromatic paintings; tiny, phantom-like black-and-white photographs; and several different kinds of works in succession paper. In their material forthrightness the paintings are stop at times to those of Manzoni or Ryman, nevertheless in Hutcheson's canvases the single-mindedness of those artists' whites is replaced by way of coagulations of one tone within another; unruffled what might be called the entertainer color is more impure t han white, for instance, a sort of patinated ivory that emanates pensiveness.

Hutcheson has a curious way of refusing to take responsibility for what periods up on her surfaces, as nevertheless stuff just accumulated, drifted around from place to place, piled up and seep away. Pieces of fabric or made of wood refuse become receptive surfaces for paint that sometimes migrates from work to work, for instance, when half-dried paintings are flattened against one another and then chanceed apart. Her work is contained over and above messy-looking--processlike without caring to reveal the nature of the proces The exacerbated tactility of the paintings' surfaces, the paint's peculiar ways of congealing, of sitting up upon a surface or collapsing back into it, are almost embarrassingly corporeal. The fact that a coupling of the paintings are predominantly in the meat color of Band-Aids (Dogwood and Overly Later, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but 1999) only heightens the suspicion that within their seeming indifference is imprinted a memory of bodily hurt

The notion of the imprint or impression is probably the principally recurrent feature of this work: Not barely have the surfaces of the paintings and works onward paper had other surfaces crushed against them, but even the photographs, taken with a child's toy camera, finish at this by seeming to have been brushed or shuffleed by light rather than record an existence or scene at some distance.

In a dialogue with Rochelle Feinstein published to accompany the joint exhibition of their photographs at Art Resources Transfer, Hutcheson speaks of the light in her photos "destroying" a mundane narrative about all the desultory materials lying around her studio, "and insinuating another," unspecified the same The images, however, appear to be double exposing s of foliage, cobwebs, or shadows and practise magic [i]or[/i] sorcery some kind of tenuous southern Gothic atmosphere, like mystical details from a Sally Mann landscape. The point is, "destroying" is really too solid a word-- "eroding" would be more like it, or maybe just "distracting from"--because in some way in both the paintings and the photographs, enough vestiges of hint remain to turn reticence into its have a title to kind of eloquence. The photographs communicate a sensation of blindness, moreover in a way closer to the perhaps painful experience of vision returning rather than failing, just as the discomfort embodied according to the paintings is somehow les akin to the attack of pain than to t he dissipation of numbness

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