March 10-16, 2005

art

On and Off the Grid

Thomas Chimes, Untitled (1964), 25 inches by 33 inches, oil on linen.

by Robin Rice

Matisse is here in leafy, bosomy curves. Picasso appears in dovelike flourishes, and Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth in flat geometries. DiChirico is evident in somber earth tones and black. Some vestige of almost any notable early 20th-century modernist flares up in these midcentury compositions, but we wouldn't mistake Philadelphian Thomas Chimes for any of them — not for long.

Chimes' exhibition at Locks Gallery opens chronologically with a series of untitled paintings seemingly based on a specific landscape. In the beginning, Chimes orchestrates three distinct orders of painter's language: straightforward representation, confined to a small distant vignette of water, green hills and sky; simple abstract forms, mostly grid-based; and glyphlike elements that often have a linear, decorative character. The interest in a represented landscape on the horizon, like a distant, idyllic Eden, vanishes within a few years. It returns in a new guise in Chimes' more monochrome representation long after the seven-year period of this retrospective.

Chimes' work is always very personal, autobiographical, often linked directly to particular places and events. The title of this show, "Confronting the Unconscious," suggests how personal these particular paintings must be. The opening passage flows as a narrative, a panorama, a train of thought. In fact, all of these paintings, even those not of the landscape sequence, reflect a continuity of thought that makes the exhibition particularly satisfying as a whole.

Meditations on oppositions both formal and conceptual are central. The human figure, with its rigid upright living stance and crucified upon a grid fragment, is exposed as skeletal, fleshy, mystical and scientific. It is essentially male and sometimes female, integrated in a reference to Leonardo's representation of the Vitruvian man. This geometric rendering, in which an X-shaped figure circumscribes a vertical squared figure, echoes Chimes' obsessive repetition of x's. They are sometimes incised, more often inlaid by calligraphy. The x's are orderly, even ornamental, but ever questioning. Other repeated markings also link the paintings.

One can't have paintings without paint. In the future, Chimes would work in delicate veils of limited color. Here he wrests spectacular effects from oil paint. We see the fat and lean, the opaque and transparent, the fine and the coarse through a transcendent magic. Untitled (1964) utilizes parallel lines of glaze almost like embroidery to capture a feeling of iridescence.

Photographs of these paintings look good, but you really have to be there.

Thomas Chimes, "Confronting the Unconscious, Early Works: 1958-1965" Through March 19, Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 215-629-1000