Timothy P. Ojile at the Honolulu Academy of Arts

Cartographers of an earlier era used the term "terra incognita" to denote land beyond the bounds of present knowing, labeled and perhaps laid claim to but still uncharted. Painter Timothy P. Ojile invokes this practice in his exhibition of works on paper and canvas created in 2003 and '04. In these painterly abstractions, he simultaneously explores and maps a "terrain" that is itself both existential and visual--concept worlds, energy landscapes.

Ojile, who has worked as an artist in Hawaii since 1981, embraces the venerable but still-compelling impulses of expressive abstraction in works that range in size up to 6 by 6 feet. He engages a process of mark-making that is at times fluid and intuitive, at times measured and intentional. Ojile uses his distinctive visual language to signal a kind of epistemic quest; where the hand leads, the mind and the person will follow.

In Aubade (Morning Serenade), dense skeins of colored lines traverse a joyfully intense yellow ground, the shifting line weights suggestive of different registers of sound. These improvisatory descriptive impulses are also found in Universal Equation, one of several works in which Ojile has introduced a parallel set of signs, juxtaposing cleanly imprinted letters and numbers with casually inscribed marks that occasionally coalesce into words. The inclusion of text signs and textlike marks, evident also in Equation in Four Parts and Tablet, are, like mapping, a means of codifying and understanding the world.

Ojile's engagement of these multiple codes comes to fruition in other works in which geometry--yet another means of mapping and measuring--enters the conversation. In Lunar Tablet, a series of precisely drawn, subtly hued circles are arranged on a field of layered gray washes minimally subdivided with horizontal, vertical and semicircular lines. Such divisions, with their implications of boundaries or perspectival spaces, are more dominant in two larger paintings on canvas. In We Sleep to Drink of the River of Forgetfulness and You Sweep Us Away Like a Dream (Psalm 90:5), a black field--a dense accumulation of scumbled layers through which passages of gray and marks of white emerge, or on which they float--becomes a new terrain with an expanded sense of time and space. Ojile's work has long had a musing, meditative quality; these layered depths and inflected surfaces extend a particularly compelling invitation to ponder both the known and the unknowable.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group