Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999 Page: 55
60 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Maggie Hills
Paul Whiting
ROBERT MCCLAIN & CO.
HOUSTON
by Bill DavenportA Long Drawing and Some Paintings about
Longing is, like its title, an odd combination.
Maggie Hills' and Paul Whiting's works are
quite different and unexpectedly complement
one another. Hills' delicate bleached water-
colors on canvas lend sincerity to Whiting's
impersonal constructions. Contextualized
with Whiting's clean, contemporary-feeling
pieces, Hills' paintings avoid reading as the
decorative landscapes they simulate. Both
artists share slightly retro imagery; Hills'
pictures of photomurals and office furniture
and Whiting's funkadelic shapes each recall
the recent past.
Hills' works invite then deny the
aesthetic enjoyment of conventionally
picturesque images. Ambivalent about the
desirability of paintings which present
authentic beauty, Hills neatly sidesteps the
problem by painting, not beautiful pictures of
nature, but pictures of pictures of nature. In
Spring Blossoms, a sticky-sweet faded landscape
of flowering yellow trees, this ambivalence is
poised on its sharpest edge. Of all of Hills'
works it is the closest to being merely pretty. If
this work was displayed in the average water-
color society roundup, it would stand out for
its large scale and mechanical execution, rather
than its prettiness and vacancy. The work has
a wallpaper-like blandness at odds with the
intense, meticulous labor of its manufacture:
nothing this pleasant and innocuous can be
true. Spring Blossom's sweet romantic haze is
only half ironic. It is as if Hills has devised a
way to paint a pretty landscape without losing
her avant-garde credibility.Hills' works operate on two distinct,
contrasting levels: from a distance they are
almost mechanically photoreal; up close, the
photoreal image dissolves into a loose network
of dabs separated by large gaps of
blank canvas. They are impression-
istic renderings of photographic
images; surely we've come a long way
from the banks of the Seine. Hills
revels in the textures of her paintings,
choosing subjects which require an
inordinate amount of detailed
dabbing. In Paradise with Tears or
Tears, the terrazzo floor is painted in a
myriad of individual jellybeans of
gray wash; in Spring Blossoms each
flower and twig is approximated by a
zillion blots of pale yellow or gray watercolor.
Hills' carefully includes anomalies in her
otherwise seamless painting to make sure that
the viewer is let in on the joke: Hotels hori-
zontal drips are the most obvious giveaway,
showing that part of the painting was worked
on while the canvas rested on its side, denying
the implicit assumption that paintings are
painted in the same orientation in which they
are seen. Likewise, she leaves borders of
unpainted canvas which upset the convention
that paintings must fit exactly on their
canvasses. In Paradise With Tears or Tears
several rectangular "patches" are painted in
slightly more intense colors as if a tear had
been mended with a swatch cut from a less
faded copy of the same painting.
Whiting's half of the show begins in the
hallway where his Untitled (Floor
Piece/Runway), a foot-high boardwalk of
square particleboard panels supported on a
neat framework of magenta 2x4 studs,
confronts the viewer with a choice: step up on
it or go around?. This choice makes questions
about the piece's status as an art object/furni-
ture object relevant and pressing. The Floor
Piece is a space articulator par excellence,
ferrying viewers from Maggie Hills' paintings
in the front space, past a typically awkward
hallway area of the gallery directly into the
second room at the back, which is typically an
anticlimactic afterthought.
Constructed of unadorned lumber, the
Floor Piece's workmanlike competence neither
confirms nor denies its own aesthetic merits,leaving the art/not art interpretation strictly
to the beholder. Its many legs extend from the
sides of the runway like the piles of a pier,
suggesting that the panels one walks on havebeen placed temporarily over a framework,
rather than being a permanent fixture.
The Floor Piece also serves as an observa-
tion platform for Whiting's Untitled (Large
Drawing). At 9x28 feet, large is an understate-
ment. Roughly the same size as the wall to
which it is pinned, the Large Drawing has the
ad-hoc temporariness of a giant poster, ready
to be rolled up after the show. Like the Floor
Piece, which is assembled with drywall screws,
Whiting's works are merely camping out in
the gallery for a time, rather than trying to
appear as permanent fixtures.
The image this poster carries is a giant
ambiguous futuristic architectonic logotype,
which could be an airport or an entertainment
center. Several "units" are silhouetted along a
platform whose blunt legs pick up and extend
the rhythm of the Floor Piece's supports.
Although not overtly retro in imagery or tech-
nique, the blurred edges and blobby filled-in
looking contours suggest the bubble-like
sprawl of a space city as imagined in 1970
which was then Xeroxed a thousand times
until all detail was lost, only to re-emerge in
1999 as the logo for a techno band. O
Paul Whiting
Untitled (Floor Piece)
Untitled (Large Drawing), 1999
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
Maggie Hills
Spring Blossoms, 1999
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
ARTLIES SUMMER 1999 55
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Lightman, Victoria H. Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999, periodical, 1999; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228053/m1/57/?q=%22Bryant%2C+John%22: accessed May 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .