Wes Mills at Berman Daferner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Susan Harris

Wes Mills's first New York solo show consisted of small, intimate drawings composed of powdered pigment on gessoed paper, averaging about 4 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches. They are as compulsive and austere as they are unabashedly personal. Living in New Mexico, not far from Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, with whose art his own has affinities, Mills has developed an original style blending ethereal delicacy and authoritative presence and integrating explorations of his inner world with his art-making process. In drawing after drawing--each discreetly but tautly bound within a 1/16-inch border--Mills reenacts powerful visual and psychological dramas through attenuated lines, shadowy forms and indeterminate spaces.

Mills's art is grounded in figuration, but body references in these drawings are more abstracted and abbreviated than those of his previous works. Phallic and moundlike forms advance and recede like clouds or stains on the surface, while overlapping networks of tenuous lines suggest the contours of male and female body parts. In one drawing, a vaporous blue shape that rises vertically is overlaid by wispy strands that suggest thighs and buttocks. In the lower half of another drawing, a rising blue form bending over at the top invites anthropomorphic associations (a full figure? a bent arm or leg?). Its shadowy contours are both echoed and transgressed by lines of varying densities moving skittishly in all directions. Hints of female curves emerge in the vortex of lines but then break up as threads float up and out into implied space.

The size and jewel-like delicacy of the paper works and a few slightly larger works on board (about 11 inches square) beckon the viewer closer. Incised in the gessoed wood surfaces, some of the lines are composed of the word "green" repeated endlessly, like a mantra. It's as if Mills were trying to exorcise from his memory the word and some painful associations. The viewer looking hard into a drawing--even without knowing the artist's personal history--can feel the intensity of Wes Mills's creative energy. [Mills's work was also shown at Laura Carpenter Fine Art, Santa Fe. See story on p. 50.]