Thinking, mapping, painting: over the last decade, Terry Winters has increasingly sought to translate systems of information—and the ways we think about them—into pictorial space

Art in America, April, 2005 by Carol Diehl

When I first came across Terry Winters's paintings, in the early '80s at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, they were somber and dark, layered with accumulations of earth-toned gestural marks that seemed labored despite their lack of refinement. While the semi-abstract forms were derived from nature, it was nature in decay, depictions not of life but of the residue of life--dry husks, shells and bones--rendered in the melancholy hues of November, and laid out like specimens within the confines of the picture plane. These were slow paintings, especially for the fast, cocaine-driven era that also brought us graffiti, Prince, big-shouldered "power suits" and Schnabel's plate-encrusted canvases. Even now, without the contrast of glitter and bombast, Winters's work of this period comes across as sober, introspective and still.

So I was not prepared, one day in 1999, to walk into an exhibition by the same artist, this time at Matthew Marks Gallery, and be blasted by some of the most energetic paintings I'd ever seen. Titled "Graphic Primitives," this group of nine oversize (75-by-108-inch) oil-and-alkyd paintings, with their color-filled surfaces, seemed to mark some heretofore uncharted midpoint between order and chaos--dense, convoluted layers of loosely painted webby grids and spirals that not only filled the canvas but suggested fields beyond its limits. Appearing to spring, geyserlike, from unseen depths, these networks erupted outward (or perhaps imploded; they could be seen both ways), implying worlds beneath and beyond.

Now l0 years of this work--Terry Winters's paintings, drawings and prints from 1994 to 2004--have been gathered in an exhibition that originated at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass., and is traveling to museums in San Diego and Houston. The overall impression is of an explosion of images by a mature artist who has overcome earlier inhibitions to the point that he can barely keep up with the ideas spewing forth, yet is eager to take on challenges that will push his work still fresher. Viewed with this in mind, his earlier canvases, revisited last winter in yet another exhibition at Matthew Marks ("Terry Winters 1981-1986"), reveal themselves as essential investigations by an earnest young painter--he was then in his 30s--thoroughly engaged in finding out what he could do with the physical properties of paint, and more concerned with the process of exploration than with making a definitive statement. Even now, when his statement has grown so much more powerful, it still seems as if his criterion for stopping work on any given piece is whether or not he's learned enough from it.

The works in the current exhibition are grouped according to the titles of the gallery shows in which some of them first appeared: "Foundations and Systems" (1994), "Computations and Chains" (1995-98), "Graphic Primitives" (1998), "Location Plan" (1999), "Set Diagram" (2000-02), "Meshworks" (1999-2002) and "Turbulence Skins" (2000-04). Separating them out this way, however, seems to be more a useful organizational exercise than a demarcation of specific series, since many of the same ideas spill over from one group to the next. All inhabit an uncanny territory between image and abstraction--they might be pictures or diagrams of something, or, then again, they might not--and hover so insistently in this middle ground that they stimulate a multiplicity of interpretations. But unlike a face seen in a cloud or an image in a Rorschach test, Winters's convoluted forms give rise to readings that do not allow the eye to rest on any single aspect, but that may be seen simultaneously. At any given moment, some or all of the following impressions may suggest themselves and then quickly fade, to be replaced by others: maps, blueprints, urban aerial photographs, steel girders, spiderwebs, X-rays, molecular structures, microscopic slides of protozoa, the wrap and woof of gauzy fabric, tangles or balls of yarn, fishing nets, the interlace of wintry tree branches, magnified crystals, computer readouts or diagrams of the neurological circuits of the brain, perhaps on information overload. That we can never figure out whether what we're looking at depicts something organic or man-made only adds to the enigma.

Writing about Olafur Eliasson [A.i.A., Oct. '04]--whose work, although sculptural and often architectural in scale, is driven by an interest in surprisingly similar patterns in nature and mathematics--increased my awareness of art that flirts with beauty yet carries the viewer only to the brink of complete esthetic satisfaction. By refusing to go wholly into the realm of sublimity it claims our attention just that much longer. With Winters, we're caught in the ambiguity of the subject matter, but he also maintains our engagement by keeping his means obvious, again like Eliasson. Employing no sleight of hand or overly elaborate technique, Winters doesn't modify his brushstrokes but lets them remain as they were first laid down. With every pass at the canvas evident, it becomes, in his words, "a picture of all the events that went into the making of the painting." (1) This revelation of activity grounds us in the present, as well as adding to the sense of freshness and spontaneity these paintings engender.