The marks of a fertile mind
Together, Joan Mitchell and Jasper Johns would seem to be an unlikely pair of inspirations for a new body of paintings, but there they are hovering in the background of 10 lovely recent works by Mark Dutcher.
Two kinds of nominal handwriting — gestural abstraction and a recognizable vocabulary of painted signs — slip and slide across his canvases.
Most of Dutcher’s paintings at Coagula Projects are of a size (4 1⁄ feet tall) that
2 informally positions a viewer a bit more than an arm’s length away, as if stepping back to size up painted marks made in a variety of colors on the canvas. Intimate, those marks include thick slathers, thinned stains and layered strokes, together with letters that may or may not cohere into words.
The thicket of painted marks hangs on the armature of a grid, either horizontal or turned to a 45-degree angle. The layering yields a sense of organic rhythms spreading across a formal structure. The two panels in “Transfer,” the show’s strongest work, even seem to loosely mirror each other, like an abstract, light-infused Mitchell “landscape” improbably crossed with a Johns “Corpse and Mirror.”
Mitchell and Johns might not have been specific inspirations here, but their very different styles both emerged in response to a dominant artistic ethos in the early and mid-1950s (in their case, Abstract Expressionism). In varying ways, their shared goal was to turn a governing visual language into something highly personal and distinctive; that’s what Dutcher also achieves in the show’s best works.