ART: Chuck Webster, Painter: Smile when you see that!

I love the blocky, child-like awkward directional changes, the scratchy canvas colors, the bold black outlines, like a child drawing maps.  The yellows punch and yell, they are aggressive and funny, like stand up comedy.  The sutures look like telephone poles askew in the tempest, kites blow about and anchor forms, a blocky heart bled and was sewed.  Clowns cavorted with blah-blah horns.  And the beautiful necklace on the yellow Nefertiti’s neckline awes with its symbolic beauty.

 From NYT, June 2012, Roberta Smith:

“Chuck Webster’s new panel paintings, seen in his sixth solo exhibition at this gallery, are the best of his career. They are also very much, if not startlingly, little big paintings: they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy.

All feature variations on an enclosed, linear, somewhat hieroglyphic motif, usually rendered in thick black lines. Suggesting cave paintings, irregular ziggurats and primitive maps, these variations also strongly evoke the art of Paul Klee, meaning they would seem natural to paintings not much larger than your face. Two works here are almost that small, but the others are five or six feet high and seven or eight across. This is not big by Gagosian standards, and that’s the point. The bigness resides within the paintings, in the three-way tension involving panel size, the drawing of the linear motif and surface textures.

Mr. Webster puts his motif through its paces, milking it for various associations, exploring different figure-ground relationships and adjusting paint handling, color and spatial depth, always guided by a generous, enlarging impulse. In the most memorable work, the black lines are thick, the area within them is white and the surrounding ground is sectioned off in big blocks of red and orange. The whole thing jumps. But each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.

Mr. Webster has debts. Philip Guston, Carroll Dunham and Jonathan Lasker are all rightly cited as precedents in the news release. But Klee’s art is his greatest obligation, which he both honors and updates on the springboard of scale.”