Well-Endowed

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

In a word?

Satisfying. Seven artists' work is effectively installed in a compact space, and a striking variety of approaches and mediums suggests perennial issues relating to drawing.

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First, of course: What is a drawing? Some colorful pieces in the show could be described as paintings. Ani Hoover's bright, bubbly PolyChrome Daydream (Orange, Green, Yellow), a painted field of nested circles loosely organized into 10-foot-tall color areas, is lighthearted and systematically intellectual. Likewise, Sabine Friesicke's Metropolitan Time pops with rhythmic small squares of high-contrast hue and value, perhaps a distant descendant of Piet Mondrian's antic Broadway Boogie Woogie.

The size of the works challenges the traditional view that drawing is a minor form. Inescapable microcosm/macrocosm contrasts illustrate the distinction between scale and size.

Just as any 7-foot-6 ball player is more likely to be a graceless klutz than a Michael Jordan, size is no guarantee that a drawing has real consequence. There aren't any klutzes in this smart lineup: Sandra Allen's lush, precise Synapse (palmroots) (pictured) is rendered in scribbled graphite and incised lines at about 10 times natural scale. Emily Brown's tiny daubs of ink construct an effective representation of massed trees from almost abstract-expressionist surfaces. Jill O'Bryan's huge rubbing of an outcropping of rock in Santa Fe is abstract and alive as it records natural phenomena in 1-to-1 scale.

Finally, there's Linn Meyers' vast explosion of wavy lines on panels of Mylar. It whirls and ripples like hair, like water, a diagram of pulsing surges of energy. Awe-inducing, beautiful — very graceful — but not a pretty picture.

Gallery proprietor Becky Kerlin pragmatically regards all works on paper as drawings. When we discard the notion that drawing is an adjunct art form, a preparation for painting, we recognize what it is: art as ambitious as it's possible to be.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Very Very Large Drawings | Through Jan. 30, Gallery Joe, 302 Arch St., 215-592-7752, galleryjoe.com.