When artworks emphasize hard-edge blocks of bold color, the eye searches for any deviation, however small. Such visual ambiguities occur in Pazo Fine Art’s “Geometrix: Encoded Abstraction” but are provided by only some of the nine artists. Sculptor Jean Jinho Kim (the only local in the lineup) and painter Don Voisine offer pieces that are tooled with machine-like precision. Indeed, Kim’s towering upright columns, bent jaggedly at the top like stylized lightning bolts, are aluminum pipes that were powder-coated at an industrial shop.
Sometimes both the shapes and the hues are precise, yet some of the colors shimmer, as in the vertical bands airbrushed by Don Dudley and the vertical ones painted by Norman Zammitt (1931-2007). Andrew Masullo arrays crisp blocks of color but allows the pigment to form small mounds that are visible upon close inspection. The forms in Neil Williams’s drawings on graph paper are geometric but filled in with colored pencil that yields heathered rather than saturated hues.
Three paintings by Harvey Quaytman (1937-2002) demonstrate the widest variations in techniques. One picture defines fields of white with borders of black and brown; the latter color is not paint but rust, and thus variable in tone and texture. Another of his pieces centers on a near-white near-rectangle that’s stained with hints of pink and blue. Unlike Quaytman’s paintings, Voisine’s never go soft, but their dominant black forms are sometimes set off by brightly hued bands. The narrow yellow stripes in “Up Lift” are indiscernible from a distance, but once seen can’t be ignored. They’re glimmers of delicacy in an otherwise burly composition.
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