Feature Inc :: Cary Smith Exhibition 14 April-19 May 2007

During the late '80s and early '90s, I enjoyed Cary Smith's elegantly formal and minimal paintings, storing them in my head left side of stiff or academic as to the peculiar and seemingly personal decisions which peppered their otherwise strict structures. Writing that now made me think of Charles Ives, the innovative composer living by day as an insurance salesman. Ives lived in Connecticut; Smith lives there now.

The most recent paintings by Cary Smith expand and specify my earlier perception of his work. They remain hard edged, rather gorgeous, and formally reductive in color and vocabulary, yet they also emit an odd exuberance which with time often translates into urgency. His titles point to this.

And as one examins the relationships between titles and the organic, curvy lines and shapes that form his rorschach-like vocabulary, one becomes sucked into the technical aspects of the paint application.

The brushstrokes are repetitive, methodical, and practical in their groupings, flip flopping between tight obsessive and easy expressive. Minutia, in terms of quantity of paint, coverage, direction and length of stroke, and as well, how the pristine, meticulous lines or shapes that have not been masked or mucked with expose the glowing blank underpainting, propels one to fathom an artist driven by and intimate and deep investment that also has a sense of humor.