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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Margaret Wall-Romana

        Margaret Wall-Romana, The Spaces,
        Oil on canvas, 62×92 in, 2005–2007.


        More years ago than I care to remember I cut my teeth, both as an artist and as a critic, to the writing of Dave Hickey. As an under– graduate I recall being immersed in the debates about beauty that followed the publication of his book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1997). Later, as a rather callow graduate student, myself and others attempted to deny the influence of beauty by raising ‘The Ugly’ as an alternate model. After nearly ten years, why is it that overtly beautiful, highly intelligent paintings still manage to throw me back to that moment when I was forced to consider beauty as an agent of aesthetic revolution instead of the saccharine coating used to disguise lack of content.

        Margaret Wall-Romana uses the language and history of aesthetics across and through cultures. For example, two of the pieces in this exhibition are cruciform shaped, but the internal formal logic of the paintings, particularly the work Parentheses (Becoming), suggests classical Chinese landscape scrolls. Abstract washes evoke atmospheric perspective through which more concrete images are glimpsed and finally coalesce on the artwork’s surface as an elegant vine. The viewer is caught in a maelstrom of energetic, curving brushstrokes that carry the eye to the tip of the vine, completing an imaginary sweep across the outstretched arms of the canvas.

        The painting Violet Marsh reads like the poetry of Byron and Shelley. The colors are dark and bruised, purples and lilacs predominate, and the work is achingly Romantic. It is a pastoral nature morte, with a bird, presumably dead, emerging from the stillness at the bottom of the painting. Birds appear in three of the works in the exhibition, but it takes a while to unearth the caudal strokes that eventually become a creature in Parenthesis (Here and There). The eye settles first on an almost centrally placed wreath, variously formed by abstract marks and highly resolved images of squash blossoms and peonies. The Spaces draws on the voluptuous genre paintings of Fragonard. The work is a diptych in which atmospheric washes of rosy pinks, grayish silvers, and baby blue hues suggest distant lands. It is these spaces through which the viewer travels to arrive at the carefully rendered images of a fallen sparrow and a delicately delineated set of beheaded roses. The blossoms are strung upon a line as if to wither and desiccate like the fallen bird below them.

        Not every narrative here ends with careful illustration. What complicates and makes the work more interesting is that Wall-Romana uses the nature of paint itself to not only suggest beauty, vulnerability, and infinite space, but also to negate those ideas. The cracked surfaces of some of her swaths of paint are downright ugly and abject, and the bilious colors she draws across the pastoral atmospheres are equally as contradictory. In Ellipses Near and Far, another diptych, the canvases are virtual mirror images of each other in terms of color and composition, with the left side almost entirely abstract and the right side more fully developed in terms of recognizable imagery. A lovely, almost vascular, dribble of paint sits mesh-like near the center of the left-hand panel, but placed centrally in the painting and forced to the surface, Wall-Romana has, instead of the more usual floral motifs, poured a dull, gray-green, flat puddle of paint. It sits there almost commanding us to make sense of the trickery of space built through abstraction, because it returns us to the concrete nature of paint as a simple material.

        Whenever I come across work that forces aesthetics to the foreground, particularly work that is as accomplished and poised as Margaret Wall-Romana’s new group of paintings, The Spaces, I am made a little uneasy. It forces me to jettison assumptions and look back at the arguments of the late nineties to see if that line of reasoning still rings true. I suspect the truth is that if the paintings make the viewer querulous, then the line holds. Beautiful artwork that prompts and raises questions about the history, ownership, and potency of aesthetics surely also holds answers to questions of politics and power within its elegant grasp.

        Margaret Wall-Romana lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.

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      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery