The surprising thing to me about Sam Gilliam's work, seen in a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is how strong his command of color is. The few pieces of his on permanent display around town generally reveal a murky palette, but here the cool abstract expressionist opens up with saturated, pure colors. Even the so-called "black paintings," like Rail (1977), are shot through with reds and acid greens. And when he turns somber, as in the folded and soak-stained April 4 (1969), part of his "Martin Luther King" series, the mauves, grays, and greens are still full of energy and incident. Scraping and scratching at his supports, Gilliam can be heard starting a dialog with the German master colorist, Gerhard Richter. Late pieces show that Gilliam is still developing. Red (1999) suggests figuration: sunset on a marsh with the sun's disk knocked out of its usual place in the sky. While the last paintings (hanging in a cul de sac: this exhibition is very oddly laid out), the poured acrylic "slatt" paintings, are Mondrian-modern, the best of them shimmering like jewels.

 posted: 3:57:40 PM       

Bill T. Jones continues to push at the boundaries of what we think of as an evening's dance concert. This evening-length suite of pieces from 1995, 2003, '04, and '05 collages modern dance, live music (Nurit Pacht and DBR on violin), spoken word, video, and ghostly projections on a downstage scrim (by Marc Downie et al.) into an intriguing, if not wholly satisfying, evening. Jones dances the suite straight through without intermission, using only two other dancers. As dancer and choreographer, he has a silken fluidity to his movement. However, his penchant for repetition, especially in 22, in which twenty-two numbered and named phrases are repeated while Jones relates two interlocking stories of tragedy, leads him toward the shoals of monotony. As a result, Jones risks being upstaged by his talented high-tech collaborators.

 posted: 3:38:07 PM