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Theresa Hackett at Florence Lynch

Art in America, March, 2005 by Stephen Westfall

In a pluralist art world we can no longer count on being periodically embraced by a zeitgeist, but instead find ourselves buffeted by squalls of mini-zeitgeists, each with its own claim to representing a shift in general sensibility and a stylistic unification of formerly disparate traditions. Theresa Hackett's breezily intricate paintings on paper mounted on linen are emblematic of a fluidly diagrammatic style that has been in play for a while now, one that brings together the graphic memory of Japanese woodblock landscapes, the Symbolist landscapes of the Blue Rider group, the more recent eccentric Outsider-meets-Paul Klee mannerisms of Fritz Hundertwasser, and the culture of cartography. Hackett's fabrication process is accumulative and loosely improvisatory, rather than reductive and end-driven. It's the pictorial equivalent of the accumulative installation esthetic that dominates contemporary sculpture. What stamps Hackett's sensibility as her own is her longstanding engagement with ocean and sky as associative pictorial orientations in even her most abstract work. Their specific elementalism is felt in Hackett's preference and deep feeling for blue and white as her principal color divisions. She is from California and a surfer. Blue and white for her are more than esthetic wish fulfillment; they are her basic experiential orientation to the world.

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The constructed physicality of Hackett's paintings is part of their immediate allure. They are sizable, with three works in this show extending to nearly 9 feet in either height or width, and the other three spanning over 5 feet in their longest dimension. Strips of felt in white and light earth colors are cut to the thickness of the stretcher bars and placed so that they run and pile up along the tops of the paintings, resembling the shifting strata of clouds caught in time-lapse photography. Hackett also slices up maps and pieces them into mound-shaped forms, comparably stratified, that rise up from the bottom of the paintings. The blue and white of water and sky rest on a smoothly layered topography of paper sections covered with a heavy acrylic medium and gesso sanded to a softer-edged surface. And, of course, the base paper sheet is itself a kind of layer placed atop linen, creating a juxtaposition that is structural, luxurious and--when one recalls Klee's and de Kooning's paintings on paper and unstretched fabric mounted in turn on board or stretched canvas--a sort of historical homage. The built-up strata speak of slow, even geological time, while the darting chromatic lines with which she limns her mound forms, and the pools of blue paint that describe either water or a nocturnal air, are signifiers of freer motion and a certain evanescence.

Hackett has always played with layers and notational drawing, just as her palette has always featured a certain color program. What has evolved most compellingly is the balance and elegance in her composition and drawing, a kind of masterful remove that's as cool as her palette. Given the open, "hot" nature of her technique and material range, the formal cool of her compositional and material integration completes the work as never before.

Theresa Hackett at Florence Lynch

Art in America, March, 2005 by Stephen Westfall

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