“Let There Be Geo”

Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 265 : Mar 25–31, 2010

Leviton A+D Gallery, through Apr 24.

Geometric shapes can propel us out of our bodies via the eye, Newcity critic Jason Foumberg suggests in the essay accompanying “Let There Be Geo.” That ability is what keeps the art in this show from getting too wrapped up in its own nostalgia, as we get lost in works such as Archer Prewitt’s and Geoffrey Todd Smith’s (pictured) obsessive, mandala-like prints and drawings.

The artists whom curator Elizabeth Burke-Dain brings together appreciate the traditions of geometric abstraction that artists like Kazimir Malevich and Robert Smithson began in painting and sculpture. But the best refer to more than high modernism’s transcendent formalism. The symmetry, repetition and patterns that make geometric abstraction so powerful in religious settings transfix the viewer before Steven Husby’s stunning color gradient paintings. Maya Hayuk’s eerily beautiful, airbrushed Passengers series combines the neon hues of the yarn paintings made by Mexico’s Huichol people with shapes evoking the “evil eyes” embedded in Turkish nazar amulets.

The pieces that simply resurrect mid-20th-century thinking aren’t as successful. The interaction between glass and light leads to a fascinating composition in Barbara Kasten’s Studio Construct 17, but the photo doesn’t move beyond modernist experiments in detaching photography from representation. Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi both pile on and peel away layers of paint, yielding a scratchy abstraction that’s overly concerned with process—to the detriment of the end result.