Painting has more in common with God than one might care to admit. Both get declared dead by cultural theorists every few years, and both face ongoing crises about how effective they are at challenging life’s most pressing issues. Painting inhabits dimensions mostly removed from the social universe, and, as a result, doesn’t do the most precise job of attacking, say, world hunger or government corruption in Nigeria. And since the Enlightenment, God’s earthly agency, too, seems limited—unless you’re an excited linebacker who’s just returned a tipped pass for a touchdown, on death row, or you’re Joel Osteen. But, with a little metaphorical imagination, God and painting are both well equipped to indirectly confront the greatest truths of all.
“Cicada Seen,” Peter Barrickman’s show at Green Gallery, buzzes… as its title suggests. It buzzes metaphorically, of course. The exhibition consists of a suite of paintings that lives in the tightest crease between representation and abstraction. Barrickman’s obscure vignettes aren’t fully abstract, but their objective subject matter takes a minute to come into focus. One of the basic joys of viewing his work is determining where the vague residue of the real world meets the idiosyncratic, painterly universes they merge into.
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