Michael Wingo at Cache Contemporary

The 11 abstract paintings in Michael Wingo's recent exhibition, executed between 2002 and 2004, are roughly half of a body of work called "The Cross Series." Executed in oil, alkyd, acrylic, gesso and charcoal, the series is united by the placement in each horizontal canvas of a dominant graphic cruciform shape that interacts with smaller and typically less readily nameable forms. The ensemble reflected a sensibility that prizes formal invention and refined elegance. Enacted in part as an exercise in quasi-improvisational play, or variations on a theme, the paintings substantiate the kind of analogies that writers and artists, Wassily Kandinsky foremost among them, have made between musical and visual artistry.

The canvases on view ranged in size from two expansive fields, each more than 100 inches wide, to four paintings that, at 29 by 38 inches, approached squares. A handsome example of the latter group is #246 (2003), which features an irregular boxy cross of bright magenta set against a light turquoise field. Slightly elongated and torqued out of alignment with the picture plane, the cross serves as a schematic structure upon which are displayed a pair of shapes that seem midway between the reductive and the representational, as their modeling vaguely suggests mysterious biological or anatomical items.

Such jumps between the graphic and descriptive are found throughout the series, and are echoed in the works' other formal complexities, such as the variety of edges found among the shapes, or perhaps most impressively, the unexpected juxtapositions of color, surface and medium. In #247 (2003), Wingo uses alkyd and acrylic to orchestrate subtle tactile contrasts, to which he adds more distinct shapes crisply drawn in charcoal. Elsewhere, he makes judicious use of fluorescent pigment to add sharp accents. Wingo's paintings are rich in compositional acrobatics, all the while positing imaginative alternatives to the endgame finality of the patterns and monochromes that pervade neo-modernist abstraction.

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