Full-throttte abstract: a current display of Julie Mehretu's canvases, some quite sweeping in scale, shows the artist's fascination with the lexicon of painting and the chaos of crowds

I saw Julie Mehretu's traveling exhibition "Drawing into Painting" at its third venue, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo (it was organized by Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis). The show includes four large-scale and eight smaller paintings that Mehretu made especially for the exhibition. At the Albright-Knox, she was invited, in addition, to curate several rooms with art from the museum's permanent collection. From the standpoint of her own work, her choices were illuminating: among them Jackson Pollock's Convergence, a classic drip abstraction from 1952; Roberto Matta's 1957 Card Players, evoking a group of gaming figures, their cards flying through space; an exquisite little Suprematist drawing of a whirling cross form, by Malevich; and, more surprisingly, a mellow Bierstadt landscape and works by Childe Hassam, Gifford Reynolds Beal and Philip Guston. As the artist saw it, her interest was aroused by the works' tendency to evoke specific places and times of to fashion a pictorial language that is internally consistent, if sometimes hermetic.

Born in Ethiopia in 1970 and raised in Michigan, Mehretu has traveled and read widely. She brings to her paintings far-flung urbanistic and virtual-world allusions, and peppers her own comments on her work with references to the Situationists and postcolonialist theory. Having herself invented and continuously augmented, from the time she was in art school, a lexicon of diminutive, abstract marks she calls her "characters," Mehretu arranges them into groups small and large--couples, gangs and crowds with which she punctuates the expansive stretches of her canvases. Beneath these vaguely figural clusters are ghostly, ink-drawn layers of city plans and modernist buildings, airports and city squares--delicately rendered schema borrowed from many sources--which establish backdreps and substructures for the surface noise. In addition, colorful orthogonals and geometric shapes strategically plot or inhabit broad sectors of her compositions as well as conjure the bright palettes of corporate logos and commercial signage. In the combination of cosmic sweep with the cloaked allusions of a latter-generation apprepriationism, Mehretu has joined a loose but growing community that includes artists like Sarah Sze, Benjamin Edwards, Sarah Morris and Kevhl Appel.

Most impressive in this show (which is presently on view at Gallery at REDCAT in the new Disney Concert Hall in L.A.) are the four large works. The smaller ones feel ineffectually repetitive (she has bestowed on these the halfhearted series title "Excerpts"). Mehretu has a knack for large scale, and, given her expressed ambition to create what she calls, under the influence of the Situationists, "psychogeographies," bigger is better. Quite striking is the nearly 20-foot-long painting Transcending the New International (2003), more like a gigantic layered drawing, done in black india ink and acrylic on canvas. Over faint plans (as we are informed--none but a sharp-sighted expert would guess) of African cities and the International-style buildings that were erected in them after the collapse of colonialism, Mehretu's little marks congregate in staccato flecks, rush along in roughly parallel curves or dissolve in atmospheric patches. Her tendency to hyper-conceptualize works well in black-and-white (as demonstrated in another such painting by her on view in the recent Whitney Biennial).

Mehretu's dystopian drift is revealed in titles like Looking back to a bright new future (2003), the name of a sweeping work in which irregular forms, colored and shaped like countries on a globe, are loosely arranged over a faint plan of the utopian city, Brasilia, begun in 1956; raking red orthogonals at the top and whooshing black vector lines make it seem as if everything is exploding outward. Similarly combustive is Dispersion (2002), a dense work bristling with allusions both to the attacks of 9/11 and the bursting of the U.S. stock-market bubble. A large blue airplane-like form pierces the composition's hurtling debris in an effective contrast of scale to the smaller marks; yellow flames rise within an indeterminate middle ground. This is the show's most energetic painting.

A modestly scaled bat highly effective catalogue was produced for the exhibition. It is ingenionsly bound with the pages held together at perforated edges, which you are meant to tear as you progress through an essay and interview, revealing, to the accompaniment of audible ripping, dense gridded spreads of black-and-white photographs: riots, demonstrations, parades, street markets and other sundry gatherings of humanity, past and present, lifted from the news. Mehretu means to generate some excitement--and she does, mainly. One hopes she will resist the pitfalls of a formula too narrowly conceived, the undoing, these days, of many a clever young artist.

"Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting" debuted at the Walker Art Center [Apr. 6-Aug. 10, 2003] and traveled to the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art [Sept. 9-Nov. 9, 2003] and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y [Jan. 24-Mar. 28, 2004]. It may be seen at CalArts Gallery at REDCAT, Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, through Aug. 8. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Douglas Fogle and an artist's interview by Olukemi Ilesanmi.

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