Ingrid Calame

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles
Through November 11

The work of Ingrid Calame has garnered a considerable amount of attention in the past three years. Known for tracing the outlines of spots and spills in the street, as a process by which to create constellations of shapes on the surface of her canvases, this Los Angeles-based artist has cleverly nestled her unusual paintings somewhere between representational painting and abstraction.

Her daring 29-foot tangerine-hued painting b-b-b, rr-gR-UF!, b-b-b (1999), which ceremoniously drapes from ceiling to floor on trace mylar, created quite a stir at the 2000 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, but her recent solo show at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles fell short of such lofty ostentation. A sparse offering of new work, this show was disappointingly lacking in the wild, unrestrained gestures of Calame’s Biennial effort.

Riddled with more contour and detail than her previous work, these paintings mark – at best – a shift in the artist’s process toward increased complexity in gesture and form. Constructed from a rather subdued palette of lime green, salmon pink and lavender, chchchchchchch (2000) flaunts an intricately webbed latticework of color and texture.

The overlapping pigments are very deliberately positioned on the canvas. Yet, almost antithetically, it is randomness, chance and utter abandon that seem, in some senses, to be the guiding principles of her work. Of course, this is a good thing – the borderline autistic title, which reads more like a protracted syllabic stutter, being the best part.

But the artist’s return to the stodgy square canvas feels like regression in the wake of her more three-dimensional work, which had begun to test the boundaries between painting and sculpture, simulacrum and citation. Ultimately, Calame’s project is a conceptual one. Interpolating between the indexical traces found by chance and the canvas, Calame develops a dynamic archaeological system to excavate meaning from the encrusted surface of the urban landscape and weave it into elaborate schematic webs.

It is this curious, subtle balance between action and representation that has catapulted her work into bold, new territories this year.




Alena Williams