Exhibition Review 2010

Here's a write-up by Jessica Baran for the Riverfront Times that I don't think I ever saw until now...

It's Getting Light: New Works by Christopher Gustave and Julie Malone

Repetitive and multilayered geometries are the basic grammar of this exhibition of work by two St. Louis-based artists. Malone composes glossy oil paintings of the accumulated squares that come of a quick brushstroke, building the surface to reveal similar underlayers of dabbed chromatics and occasionally emphasizing the shape of the painted gesture with a drawn square outline. Gustave cuts small squares of paper and layers them in ascending sizes, creating tiny piles of color that are then affixed to a paper page or wood panel in idiosyncratic grids. Anonymous pills make their way onto these piles, and do formal service to the image by their offsetting pale hues and circularity. The exhibition appears like a chronicle of non-dramatic narratives — the kind inflected by mid-daylight, affective moods, weather in flux and the dim bruise of tedium — that over time manage to implicate something larger or incite a revelation by default.

Through February 12 at Hoffman Lachance Contemporary, 2713 Sutton Boulevard, Maplewood; 314-960-5322 or www.hoffmanlachancefineart.com. Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Wed.-Fri., noon-5 p.m. Sat and by appointment.