CASCADE detail RICHARD LOVING ecent W oo +r kRichard Loving: Two Kinds of Order startling development has occurred in the work of Richard Loving, a transformation and an exhilarating synthesis. Always a brilliant colorist, Loving has retained his celebratory palette, dominated by rich blues, purple, and mauve, and punctuated by his signature stitch-strokes and dots in yellow, orange, and green. Absent from these new canvases, however, are the familiar pictographs the artist previously used to compose his odes to physical and metaphysical experience: briefly (and reductively) stated, flowers stood for sex, flames for passion, coils for energy, spirals for growth, ladders for transcendence, crystals for wisdom. The dualities Loving explored by juxtaposing those symbols are now signified in a more abstract way; in the present work, stylistic codes bear the weight of meaning. An all-over web of gestural stain and spatter forms a curtain of ambiguous space in each of Loving’s large new paintings. Referencing abstract expressionist procedures and content, this ground evokes a sublime chaos, created by broad movements of the artist's body, by gravity, liquidity, and controlled chance. The pointillist networks, on the other hand, that cling to the surface of each canvas offer a different kind of order, based on minute and repetitive motions of the hand and brush. Loving’s admiration for Byzantine mosaics and his early work in enamel surely inform this aspect of his technique. Compared with the implied spontaneity of the backgrounds, this methodical markmaking seems calculated, even ritualistic. The dot and the dash are Loving’s mantras, life itself the subject of his meditation. Although these discrete systems of background and foreground establish contrasts between freedom and discipline, nature and artifice, or illusionistic space and modernist surface, the two levels of painting are intricately related. Dot patterns adhering to the picture plane pick out and follow the irregular contours of distant nebulae in Barranca, for instance, creating a perceptual push-pull of near and far. Loving labels his efforts “biomental,” suggesting a yogic union of different kinds of activity, paralleledin the synthesis of styles evident in these pictures. Other methods of paint application—scumbled passages in the circles in Shaman or long brushy strokes and sprayed white bursts in Sightful — add further expressive dimension to the work while proposing the myriad possibilities of allusive abstraction. Preserved in this current work is Loving’s long-time fascination with fountains and fireworks as metaphors for the flow of life and for climactic or peak experiences. The whirling eddies of Cascade and the explosive, multicolor shower in Sightful are torrential emblems of physical joy or psychological revelation The single literal motif remaining in these paintings, the facial profile in Sightful, represents a remarkable, if quietly understated, awakening. Formerly, this witness, a recurring element in Loving's iconography, wore a blindfold — as can still be seen in the sequence of prints that make up Cru. Although linked to the idea of an inner, spiritual vision opposing a world of external appearances, the blind observer intimates, on another level, a state of denial, a reluctance or inability to see. If the unobstructed gaze of the head in Sightful signals a psychic victory, Crux commemorates Loving’s struggle towards this resolution. Several years ago, the artist recognized the broken crystal with a flower and spiral emerging from it as a personal symbol for the death and deliverance of loved one. The crystal motif is repeated in these eight etchings, together with the unwilling witness; the black grounds and black frames lend a subtly funereal quality to the series. Significantly, Loving has configured the prints in a lozenge shape on the wall — carving out a negative central space in the form of a cross. Crux thus becomes a narrative of denial, of mourning, but also a sign of redemption and release from suffering. Its message, and the message underlying all Loving’s mature works, is the powerful admission that life is a continuum of loss and pain, growth, discovery, sorrow, and ecstasy. Sue TaylorCASCADE, 1992, oil on canvas, 70" X 50"SHAMAN, 1992, oil on canvas, 70" X 50"BARRANCA, 1992, oil on canvas, 70" X 50"Roy Boyd 739 North Wells Chicago, Illinois 60610