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Dan Christensen at Edward Thorp
Art in America, March, 2005 by Jonathan Gilmore
One of the earliest works in this nearly four-decade mini-retrospective of Dan Christensen's paintings was a 1968 untitled 7 1/2-foot-high vision of twirling ribbons of color winding around each other in helix formations that seem barely contained by the canvas's edges. Sprayed in liquid acrylic on an unprimed or neutral ground, a signature technique for Christensen in the 1960s, the multitude of intensely chromatic lines creates a densely inscribed but still airy allover surface that suggests Color Field painting, the style within which Christensen came to prominence. But here, as in several similar products of this technique--such as Conjugate (1967), a canvas in which the colored ribbons roll from side to side as they pile up in a vertical plane--there is a Slinky-like tautness and containment that distinguishes his work from that of Frankenthaler and Louis. In other works, such as Sarajevo (1969), the ground is composed of abutting fields of soft, muted hues, before which colored sinuous lines float through a misty space in ascending, interlocking loops, registering the movement of the artist's arm as he made them.
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The open springiness of the early work gives way to heavy, clotted surfaces in paintings of the 1970s. Luna Moth (1972) has a thick, creamy white, frostinglike surface, wiped or squeegeed over an underpainting of greens and yellows that here and there peek through. Gainsborough (1975-76) imposes a similar field over patches of violet, blue, orange, green, rust and rose, but now the paint appears violently applied, pulled and poured in contrary waves, in some places forming a hard shell.
Later works return to the high-keyed hues and atmospheric effects of the ribbon canvases, but appear less completely devoted to the vicissitudes of pure paint and color, sometimes betraying a hint of figuration. Artic Pi (1989), an oval form painted in shimmering silver and ringed by colored bands, suggests a mirror. And a subsequent work, April Blue (1995), is a broad field of metallic marine interrupted by floating cell-like forms, recalling sea life, with soft, brightly colored haloes or penumbrae. Although many of these works hark back to the postpainterly abstract art of the '60s, they are composed with novel pigments, metallics and pearlescents, and commercial colors, among other devices, that situate them in the near present. The bull's-eye motif of Memo (1991), for example, in which a white circle surrounds a bright green disc, may imply the aspiration to purity and autonomy of the target paintings of Kenneth Noland. But in its silvery mint-green ground and cool white band edged in violet, it also conveys the experience of such everyday, debased phenomena as fluorescent light and the phosphorescent glow of a television's cathode-ray tube.
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