Paintings Draw You In, Disruptingly

"Carbon I" by Richard Martinez. Photo by Michael Swellander

"Cheap" by Kim Cadmus Owens. Photo by Michael Swellander

Magnetic Fields at the Southwest School of Art brings together work from four contemporary American (actually, mostly Texan) painters: Barbara Kreft (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Richard Martinez (San Antonio), Kim Cadmus Owens (Dallas) and Dan Sutherland (Austin). These artists play with and disrupt various elements of image-making from landscapes, to objects to the canvas itself, resulting in a show that, for its stated interest in incongruity, coheres quite well.

Connie Lowe, the show's curator and Professor of Art and Art History a UTSA, divides the paintings into two groups. "One," she writes in the foreword to the show's program, "is dominated by ordered abstract pattern with an emphasis on surface or shallow space (Kreft and Martinez)."

Kreft's vibrantly colored patterns derive their forms from the barrage of lines and shapes one experiences moving through the world: shadows on the street, paint peeling from a wall. Her work in Magnetic Fields resembles the repeating arabesques and palmettes of Persian carpets. Although, like Persian carpets, Kreft emphasizes the flatness of her designs, paintings like Floralis have a hypnotic, absorbing quality that creates an illusion of depth. Kreft's paintings aren't nearly alienating enough to narrow attention to their shallow spaces.

Martinez's "shaped format" paintings, however, draw much more attention to themselves as objects and are therefore better at appearing "shallow." Martinez customizes his canvasses out of traditional rectangles and squares into objects that more closely resemble table tops. He paints them a single striking color (dark blue, black, copper) and breaks up the spaces with thin white lines. Martinez's paintings are minimalist fields that, with their eccentric borders, direct less attention to themselves than to what is beyond them.

The second category of paintings Lowe describes as "characterized by an excess of information with space that is deep, layered, and folded, entangling abstract shape and pattern among recognizable images (Owens and Sutherland)."

Owens' paintings present decaying urban landscapes (dilapidated buildings, faded billboards) with weird transfusions of abstract patterns. A hundred colorful lines stand straight up behind a decaying warehouse or extend down a block of condemned structures. Owens is interested in the impact of digital mediation on human senses, and this may explain the appearance of frenetic activity occurring around and within what we would usually call ghost towns.

In Dan Sutherland's paintings one recognizes vague shapes and colors of art historical moments -- here specifically the spare, Northern European light of Flemish Baroque paintings. The artist applies a technique of breaking up images into tiny units, which makes his paintings look pixelated. Sutherland's paintings appear "shallower" here than Owens' for how they objectify the elements of familiar styles, thereby involving the viewer in, or at least presenting to the viewer, the activity of image-making.

Magnetic Fields is a very well curated show, with all of the paintings fitting together really well as a joint exhibition. They complement each other through their use of pattern, penchant for strict, straight lines, vibrant colors and use of rich oil paint. All the paintings, from Owens' landscapes to Martinez's flat fields, share in common lushness and and intense delight in materials.

Magnetic Fields runs through May 15 in the Russell Hill Rogers Galleries at the SSA downtown campus.