Dannielle Tegeder

Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago
Through June 2

Dannielle Tegeder is a practitioner of what is practically an international style in recent, geometric abstract painting. In her intriguingly self-conscious, coy, and mannered endeavors, meaning gets supplanted by meandering, the grid by the grin, becoming, in the hands of someone like Tegeder, totally appropriate and interesting.

In works such as Tangerine Secret City with Underground Stations, lots of things are relaxed; verticals and horizontals lose much of their potential for existential rigor—generated now not out of some cathartic opposition of shape, but from following the echoes of the ground-plans, circuit-boards, flow-charts, or urban subway systems that Tegeder employs here and elsewhere. Stark confrontations of bold color turn subtle and fey, hypersensitively adjusted and freshened.

Tegeder even drops in little bits of organic incident, small clusters of seedpods and the like, all loosening the moribund straitjacket of hard-edged abstraction. It begins with her background colors. These are two-tone jobs that become delicate color fields. Tegeder fiddles with how these two colors comprise her environments, but they usually appear as two large horizontal blocks. Her shades are chromatically elusive—curious lemon yellows, pale apricots, olive greens, and an infinity of seemingly casual adjustments of these and more.

These color blocks become the backdrops for some stunningly deadpan but mesmerizing bits of delicate schematic drawing, enhanced by descriptive but mildly tongue-in-cheek titles such as Yellow Escape Plan With Red Igloo. It is as if Tegeder is transcribing portions of some old electrical circuitry manual, or the faint residue of some modernist scheme to reprogram traffic flow. It could be both or neither; it doesn’t matter.

What is revealed here is the way that our eye will dutifully follow a contiguous chain of linear incident wherever and whyever it will lead, turning here and there, now rushing boldly forward, then getting busy and obsessive. Up, down, left, right; Tegeder’s work reminds us that the visually skillful manipulation of these core inclinations loses none of its power to compel interest.




James Yood