Shaw’s Bland Art Can’t Live Up to Overblown Interpretation

Somewhere between Reesey Shaw’s understated art and Dave Hickey’s overstated catalogue essay lies a middle ground of eloquence, self-confidence and appealing energy. Rarely, however, do Shaw’s forms and Hickey’s words meet there.

“Reesey Shaw: Selected Works 1980-1990,” at the Mesa College Art Gallery through April 6, traces the evolution of the artist’s style from blithe decoration to austere formalism. “Trinity,” representing the earlier phase, and “Nature” the more recent, together mark this shift in clear, before-and-after terms. Both are wall-mounted wood constructions, painted in encaustic, a combination of pigment and wax fused to the painting surface while warm. In “Nature,” Shaw also uses oil paint.

In “Trinity” (1982), overlapping planes of cream and pale mauve form a modest-size rectangle, a stage for three floating crescents, one each in light blue, drab green and white. A band of light blue, speckled with green, crowns the ensemble. Quiet to the point of blandness, “Trinity” occupies its space with demure politeness. Its title hints at spiritual meaning, but its form retreats shyly from any such commitment.

“Nature,” begun the same year but completed in 1989, assumes a grander posture and achieves a far more powerful presence. Over six feet tall, the work’s three separate but adjoining vertical bands echo the scale and rigidity of the upright human body. Here, the title and green, white and blue bands suggest the earthly triumvirate of land, air and water, and the fluid, relatively flat surface of “Trinity” has given way to one more heavily textured, scraped and melted smooth.

Like many sculptors in the late 1980s--such as Mark Lere and Jene Highstein--Shaw, a local artist and curator, has struck a winning compromise between the geometry of minimalism and the idiosyncrasies of organic form. Her “Untitled Plank” (1986) and “Flat Mantis” (1986) deviate just enough from the basic and blocky to suggest animate energy. Their surfaces, too, have been individualized, personalized, unlike the uniformly slick skins of minimalist sculpture.

In about half of Shaw’s recent works, this sublimation of organic elements is performed with grace and elegance. The others, such as the works related to head forms, lack both the purity of their peers and the whimsical, albeit shallow, character of their precedents. They protrude clumsily from the wall, heavy and mute.

Dave Hickey, a gifted writer and critic, presents quite a different artist in his catalogue essay, one whose work offers a profound meditation on the nature of loss and decay, or its converse, the process of becoming. Such depth can be found in “Nature,” or perhaps in “Flower,” another of the tripartite works, but most of Shaw’s wall sculpture cannot sustain such ambitious interpretation. Ultimately, the imbalance in tone is flattering to neither subject nor author.