Eric Freeman at Mary Boone

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Edward Leffingwell

Recasting the 19th-century quest for the sublime, Eric Freeman marshals fields of electric color and optical effects in the service of an abstracted landscape. Of the five vivid, oil-on-linen paintings included in this show of untitled works dated 2003, four are 8 feet square, and of those, three express the distinct horizon-centered orientation of a landscape with a central darkness disclosed as though from between thin, parted lips. The paintings' upper and lower halves seem symmetrical and appear to swell out horizontally from the support, expanding through sometimes hot, often acidic hues that resolve into thin bars of graduated color that bracket the upper and lower edges. The fourth, identified by gallery coding as 8628, suggests some distant kinship with Rothko in a thick, burning-red band across the painting's center. It shifts to darkest blue-black and fades to a lighter, almost periwinkle blue.

If Freeman achieves the sensation of compelling illusion by modulating his palette through gradations of light and color, these works are at once resolutely hand-painted and virtually without expressive gesture. The surfaces instead reveal the careful accumulation of paint in regular tracks laid down by Freeman's broad brush as it is dragged without interruption along the painting's width, leaving parallel lines of paint the width of a thread. There are slight incidents of brush hairs and bits of matter attributable to minor variations in the linen weave, or minuscule, clotted flecks of pigment that record the Zen of his process. Below and above the midpoint of the work coded 8629, Freeman extends bands the color of a sky hemorrhaging orange at sunset. They feather to ethereal bars the color of an eggshell, with only the passing illusion of an egg's matte surface. Each line implies the possibility of the painting's endless extension while at the same time suggesting that with Freeman's control of this reductive technique, he might undertake a painting as long as he pleases and as long as the linen support and walls for hanging allow.

The fifth work is an emphatically horizontal painting in which color is applied vertically. At 10 feet long and not quite 4 feet high, the painting seems to bow out at the center, at the most intense moment of its sky-blue length. Toward either end, the blue shifts to darkening, vertical bands of green, then to darkest green. Not only from a distance do these paintings recall the sublime material fetishism of Yek's airbrushed concave panels and resemble Robert Irwin's subtle, meditative disk paintings of the 1960s. They may well be members of the same church, sitting in different pews.