LA Weekly “Picks of the Week”

October 18-24 2002

Gary Szymanski, Aaron Parazette

The New Color Abstraction continues apace, embracing more and more of the Old Color Abstractions — color field painting, minimalism, hard edge, finish/fetish, even aspects of pre-war constructivism — in a riotous, nearly irony-free revival-cum-homage of and to the non-objective world. Gary Szymanski’s resuscitation of Op art, for instance, is entirely sincere, marrying the acid (-trip) palette of Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz to the cool insistence of Agnes Martin’s all-encompassing grids. As a result, Szymanski’s square paintings — and especially his not-square diptychs, in which canvases of different colors abut and nearly set one another afire — glow, hum and provide the visual equivalent of a SweeTart™ hurts-so-good rush. At the same time they nearly disappear, effaced into a kind of meta-invisibility. The paintings are there, but because their mosquito-netting-like mesh and hallucinatory hues provide an effect rather than an image, you don’t see them so much as feel them.

By contrast (get it?), Aaron Parazette has ratcheted down his own luminous approach. Although they are extravagantly curvaceous, nearly to the point of kitsch, Parazette’s arabesques establish definite figures against equally distinct grounds. The bands comprising those grounds are different enough in size and color to suggest highly stylized recessional spaces, even land- and sea scapes. (You always wind up reading one border between colors as a horizon line.) The relational quality of these compositions is heightened by all the knots and arabesques into which each ribbonlike figure, streaming and swirling like a wind-whipped pennant, bends itself. They may be very different from Szymanski’s obdurate but electric grid patterns, but Parazette’s bright, suggestive images take your eye for no less wild a ride.

Gary Szymanski at DoubleVision Gallery, 5820 Wilshire Blvd.; thru Oct. 19. (323) 936-1553. Aaron Parazette at Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. #A1, Santa Monica; thru Oct. 26. (310) 453-3031.

—Peter Frank