Broadly Speaking

Alice Aycock’s work entrances with its fantastic vocabulary: dashing futuristic configurations in league with urgent primal forces. She wrests zooming, twisting conglomerations of tiny, almost cartoony, forms into convincing (if still happily discombobulated) compositions; and the aplomb with which she resolves all these idiosyncratic elements and energies is masterful. Yet, surprisingly, it is color that distinguishes these two superb drawings, color entrenched in the paper itself: an authoritative red and a deep, dignified purple.

Aycock’s scale can be droll, but it is knowing. Despite the major 40” x 60” proportions of these papers, the drawings feel like adjustments to a smaller scale. Her tight, hard forms in ink, marker and charcoal have structural, directional references: opaque white struts outlined in black, chunky gradated grey arrows, a glowing yellow brick road.

These arrangements are played out with a sure hand, but a sense of strangeness persists, perhaps because the images and the paper stay separate. The shapes toss and turn, they burgeon and plunge; but neither extraordinary field of color releases an illusion of space. Remarkably, it is the calm concreteness behind all the action that makes these drawings seem so new. The papers insist on being here, even as we see the artist’s daring dynamics, right there! Definitely Aycock, plus a new twist.

Mel Bochner’s work, too, both confirms a mature artist’s distinctive vision and sharpens our attention with something new. The surface of white paper bonded over black is as cool as old, worn stone or mist. Translucently, above the center, the phrase LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT appears several times, overlaid.

This work is a very rare uniting of the meaning of words and their material, physical presence in the world. They emerge simultaneously toward your consciousness and your eye. If you have ever played catch in the fog on a beach, you may remember how the ball amazingly becomes sensible as it comes toward you into visibility through the misty air.