Art In America , July 1997

Michael Kessler at Schmidt/Dean (Philadelphia) , Littlejohn Contemporary (New York)

Michael Kessler’s handling of surface texture is strikingly accomplished. The range of his visual effects wide indeed, from long languidly curving drip forms and pooling blobs, to squeegeed foliate forms delicate as branch corals, to complex tortoise-shell swirls of compelling visual depth. The works in Kessler’s two recent shows owe much to this textural virtuosity. The Schmidt/Dean exhibition in Philadelphia showed Kessler’s large acrylic-on-wood paintings while Littlejohn Contemporary displayed closely related, smaller works on paper.

Kessler’s recent move to the Southwest hasn’t had the expected effects on his work-lighter color, more open vistas, instead much of the work is dark-warm, and coppery, with a below-the-surface, geological ambience. And his multiple layering of visual events, often setting geometric structures against organic forms can become, in some works, dizzyingly baroque.

Architectonic devices have played an increasing role in Kessler’s work. In Fire Wall I and II (all works 1996) , they are used to create a horizontal progression of windowlike openings , with satiny brown whorls peeking through a skylike blue surround. Here and in other works with densely packed squares floating in more open backgrounds (I Ivory Tortoise, and African Bark I and II, both acrylic on paper), I wondered if he’d been influenced by the flat window effects of computer graphics. In another pair of works , African Geometry I and II , the pilling up of L-shaped geometric variations seems to get the upper hand over the free-form elements, as barklike striations are subsumed by the all-over plaid.

In Fiery Tortoise I all these elements come together. The painting’s long, looping rootlike strands flow in and out of a central rectangle, maintaining their identity even as they shift from muted olive (outside) to brilliant orange (within the rectangle) and back again. No longer polarized, flatness and depth are made to interweave and play against swirling , overlapping strands. This work , nearly 7 feet long, attains that epic bearing that I think of as Kessler’s natural mode.

Here and in the much smaller Liquid Earth 7 (20”x 80”) which makes simultaneous references to sky (bright four-pointed stars studding the canvas) to earth and to floating microscopic life , Kessler makes clear his continued devotion to nature as his muse. Indeed, his insistent sectioning off of works begins to offer itself as a way of experiencing different scales of perception, or orders of being-from microscopic to macrocosmic-juxtaposed, different, yet somehow kin to one another.

Miriam Seidel , Artist and Reviewer