Nickell’s Cultivated Randomness

Patrick Nickell’s lovely pencil drawings seem like gentle memorials to a passing world, a world formed through an intricate fusion of nature and industry. All vertical, they occupy a newly familiar territory in the Postmodern nether land, somewhere between representation and abstraction.

Visually the images at Kohn Turner Gallery recall seaweed, vines, thickets and brambles, as well as the decorative, man-made counterparts of organic plant life that get rendered in wrought iron and lace. Likewise, the overall shapes of the tightly packed pictures bring to mind amoebas, hives, wreaths, trellises and ponds. Yet none are descriptive of any particular phylum of plant or any specific garden gate.

Instead the compositions feel utterly random, as if the drawings had been doodled into existence. There’s no telling where Nickell began to draw and where he ended, and no singular focus can be identified. Your eye just jumps into the fray and begins to follow the contours of a seemingly haphazard pattern. The path can be circuitous and lead to countless other avenues, or it can be a blunt dead end.

For all that, Nickell has carefully orchestrated these pictures. He distributes flat gradations of graphite gray to infuse his linear patterns with a seductive illusion of depth and airy openness. Sometimes the graphite is dense and black, the pencil having practically engraved the paper; elsewhere it’s so spare the silver tracery skims lightly across the surface. Between the unmistakable assertion of casual randomness and an obviously careful sense of composition, the best of these uncanny drawings have the buoyant feel of wandering thoughts interrupted by small epiphanies.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-3469, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.