La Cienega Area

Internationally recognized New Yorker Terry Winters has come a long way since the early ‘80s when his botanical paintings were mistakenly interpreted as nature studies (by this reviewer and others.) Now that artists on both coasts apply the process concerns of Minimalism to recognizable imagery, Winters’ importance as a spearheader of this aesthetic is appreciated.

Similar in feeling to his gorgeous diagrammatic paintings of spores, biological and plant life, a nine-etching portfolio of bloated, transparent cell masses was printed in Paris with such care that the prints give the material impression of wet watercolor on soppy absorbent pulp. Finely rendered organic globules float in gray washes and appear to be quickly dividing like egg cells in the early stages of fertilization. One sphere is covered with craggy barnacled compartments, in another, star-like filaments emanate from small nuclei extending over the surface of a turgid blob like stretching chromosomes or the webbed matrix of a geodesic dome.

It’s now clear that Winters’ works are not about the objects depicted but about biologic or geometric development and the broader concept of the orderly accretion of matter or information which underlies natural systems and the process of painting alike. Using a recognizable image as a non-narrative, self-reflexive tool that comments on painting process--which is Winters’ main thrust--would be inconceivable without the groundwork of Minimalism. However compelling his conceptual base, in these etchings Winters is ultimately a poetic, first-rate draftsman able to call up the logic of mathematics and the sensual illogic of creation in one deft stroke. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 625 N. Almont Drive, to May 13.)