As Rothko's color fields can absorb a viewer, and Lewitt's painstaking wall drawings entangle, Kate Beck's experiments with the emotional and abstract potential of line demand a certain amount of submission. Given the many binary factors that constitute both the conceptual and formal foundations of Beck's work, the spacious and serene Icon Gallery in Brunswick provides an ideal venue to meditate on the 24 drawings and paintings quietly inhabiting its four rooms. Relying on the potency of black and white, as well as a command of quadrilateral shapes, Beck employs minimalist structures and conceptual components without giving up enjoyment of expressionistic freedom.The works featured in "Whitespot" all use graphite as a primary medium, mostly on paper, with six oil-and-graphite paintings on canvas interspersed throughout the rooms. The smaller works invite a close inspection of the history of mark-making, and larger pieces encourage the viewer to step back and experience greater relationships. In her drawings, shapes are built from an accumulation of line, not contained by walls, hovering among negative space that both surrounds the shape and becomes it. Other forms are limited by the boundaries of her canvas.
While Beck uses a limited vocabulary of formal elements and palette, her sensitivity to variation in materials, as well as contextual and environmental changes, results in subtle fluctuations of line quality and density. She exercises both intuition and restraint in the execution of tightly arranged parallel lines, and in some works has a reductive approach, smudging, erasing, and recreating lines to affect the weight of resulting shapes, or objects.
This subjectivity to variation is what makes the drawings buzz, renders the lines active, and inserts the personal expression of the artist into the most sterile and rigid of forms. When seen from afar, they appear to contain the information of bar codes, mimic the depth of landscapes, and even begin to evoke figures.
In Beck's more successful works, her lines possess an infinite quality that results in a tangible tension with the geometric forms containing them, and, when regarded for long enough, strict rectangles seem to burst into fireworks. While Beck's hand is meticulous and controlled, the finished form possesses a pulse as the eye vacillates between negative and positive spaces. This feels like the forms presented are a sample of, or window into, a much larger presence. Whether this presence exists without the viewer's subjective response to it seems unclear.
Although black and white, and the spectrum between, are the only colors used to create her forms, Beck relies again on the power of suggestion, as well as optical illusion to pull blues, yellows, and greens from reverberating passages within the shapes. The most compelling result of her manipulation of these simple elements is their apparent limitless potential.
Beck uses a straight edge to accomplish lines that are generally flawless, and as the scale of the work differs, so does the extent of her physical exertion in maintaining a smooth and consistent line. The oscillating line quality in larger drawings is potentially due to the physical requirements of completing a line, adding an element of stroke and impulse that silently battles with the tedium of perfectionism. While her forms are strict, they are not entirely premeditated, and their elements organically form relationships based on the additive and subtractive responses to emotionally inspired marks. In a way, Beck presents a more human face to minimalism, and a more structured and objective access to abstract expressionism.
Annie Larmon can be reached ataglarmon@gmail.com.
