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

A New York kid who came to his vocation early, attending the High School for Art and Design and later Pratt Institute, where he also studied architecture and industrial design, Winters grew up in the context of the city's galleries and museums. There he developed his early enthusiasm, still clearly unabated, for the work not only of Mondrian but also of Newman, Pollock and de Kooning. "They invented a world to be explored, not to be moved away from," he says, "one that's not exhausted but barely begun, a stepping stone into a place we can't even imagine yet." Therefore, although he graduated from art school in 1971, Winters seems to have avoided the whole "painting is dead" Sturm und Drang of the '70s by sticking resolutely to his innermost interests--hence the dark paintings that seem not at all of their time--and coming out the other side better for it. Of his working method, he says, "I try to keep myself a bit off balance in order to achieve results that are unpredictable or unforeseen," and adds, "it's only through connection with intuitive or unconscious forces that we contact the fresh and new."

Regardless, the transition from the nature-derived paintings to Winters's present format was hardly sudden. In fact its inception might be found in one of his earliest pieces, a breathtakingly intense charcoal drawing titled Dark Plant 1 (1982), which focuses on a beautiful, yet slightly sinister roselike shape of the blackest black, whose barely perceptible center seems to teem with the force of life. So while Winters's more diagrammatic work coalesced in the aforementioned Compositional Architecture, it had been developing incrementally over a long period of time. In a series of paintings from the early '90s, not extensively exhibited in this country, he began to work more abstractly and often in primary colors, gradually emphasizing and magnifying lines and patterns, superimposing one over the other until they became complex schemes that filled the entire canvas. This approach culminated in paintings such as Graphics Tablet (1998), which is so congested with activity that the fissure that appears to be opening down the center can be seen as representing a desire for breathing space. Then as now, Winters's explorations were supported by extensive excursions into printmaking, mixed-medium works on paper, and ink or graphite drawings. It isn't unusual for him to set himself to the task of making a series of 100 or so related images, leaving the impression that artistic growth, in his case, is often generated through sheer volume.

"Turbulence Skins," the most recent group of works in this exhibition, presages further shifts in Winters's evolution, and here he incorporates some of the language and concerns of his nature-oriented paintings to dynamic ends. In Standardgraph/1 (2003), he limits himself to three colors: black, white and a predominant blue. The overcharged grid has become not an end in itself, but an animated terrain over which float a number of black, irregular ovoid shapes, which themselves serve as a ground for slightly more regular rows of smaller white and pale-blue disks that drift across the surface like leaves on water. The image adds to Winters's lexicon of contradictions: if a painting can be at once active and peaceful, this one is.