0 is the best of the three paintings by Lauren Quin in Quickening, a group show also featuring work by Bri Williams and Elizabeth Englander. In 0, Quin walks the tightrope of mediating a variety of formal elements into a synthetic and voracious picture. The layered surface cascades into itself as quickly as it interrupts itself. It vibrates like a field of electricity, full of chaos and psychedelic apparitions, and yet is held together by an arresting unity which appears to emerge at once from above and below — that is, it appears as calculated as it does spontaneous. The few shapes which suggest representational forms dissolve into the rest of the picture too quickly to be recognized. There is a constant escorting of the eyes around the canvas, like olives circling its whirlpool. Its general affect is one of manic vibrance. I’m reminded of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes: upright with dignity in appearance, while boiling over internally with instability, impatience, and a unquenchable desire for sensations. 

Eight shares an air similar to 0; however, where the latter is manic and luminous, the former is almost sludgy and lethargic. Here I am reminded of Beckett’s impulsive and absent-minded Molloy. The routes in the painting provided by the large green curves could be likened to Molloy’s experience navigating the towns in his journey to his mother’s house. Each turn is followed by an abrupt collision, a detour, an encounter, a spell of amnesia, a reencounter, some scattered debris, an unreachable itch, a fit of coughing, and so on. 

The cohesion and intensity of Eight is damaged by an orange stain, shaped like ball lightning, insecure about the frame and awkwardly posed in the center like a deer in headlights. Maybe Eight wouldn’t be so disappointing if this orange shape weren’t so simultaneously assertive and uninteresting. There is plenty there that could redeem it otherwise. By contrast, there are streaks of yellow stains in 0 which not only support the unity of the picture but dissolve into it. 0 mocks Eight from across the gallery. 

In 0, the marks made by removing paint settle into conflict with those made by applying it. At the edges, the negative marks are the only ones that don’t continue beyond the surface of the painting. They clamp down on the other layers while the latter burst out. A conflict is produced here about the status of the picture as either a window or a delimited object. This conflict rhymes with the tension between depth and flatness generated by Quin’s tubular motifs. A war is waged, not only between the paintings but within them. But only 0 is able to sustain the explosion within it until further notice. It is this dynamic suspension and suspended dynamic that drives the painting into a quality picture. Meanwhile Eight is more or less satisfied by being contained within the borders of the canvas. Perhaps this, in addition to the awkward orange stain, contributes to the thinner, flimsier impression it gives.

Carotid takes a different approach entirely. It is at a much smaller scale and has a kind of timidity that is nowhere in the other two. A cozy atmosphere of soft yellow-browns, red-browns, and sharp greens cloaks the tart pink and purple shape and its blue shadow. It oozes a kind of golden-hour serenity where the others are agitated. It is not scale alone which makes this picture appear more subdued. The activity of the painting, in comparison with the other two, is dramatically reduced. There is a simplicity here which, in an earlier draft of this review, I mistook for comfort and conformity. Actually, Carotid is just as ambitious, but its ends are different and so its means are too. Carotid’s mark in this show is its tenderness. 

Quin’s colors are discomfitingly artificial. Nothing suggests painting from nature except the titles: 0, Eight, and Carotid. But at most, the eternal truth of numbers and the scientific fact of arteries serve Quin as a springboard into something altogether distinct. Quin’s works crystalize an intoxicating atmosphere. In them, the unresolved tasks of past generations reemerge — the old soul is given a new gloss.

The best example is the subversion of the quick “mark” in her painstakingly rendered tubular forms. It is with this motif that Quin wants to do something new in her paintings. But it is not the tubular forms which make these paintings good or even interesting. Instead it is her intuitive sense of creating and managing compositional tension. Her ability in each painting to leverage the particular elements into dynamic tension with each other is what has led all three works to embody a refreshing childish explosion of energy — more sugar-rush than tantrum. 

The other works in Quickening by Bri Williams and Elizabeth Englander are not bad, but they are not so daring. Quin’s paintings were confrontational to my own taste and dodged the pitfalls which tend to turn me off to contemporary abstract paintings. This in itself signalled to me something worthwhile about them. Eight and 0 emerge from the quaint context of 21st century painting with a fighting attitude, but Eight’s bite doesn’t match its bark. If Quin has a weakness in Quickening it is this inconsistency. In 0, she proves she is capable of overcoming the shortcomings of Eight. And with Carotid she gives a glimpse at the range of her expressive capability.

Quickening is open at Smart Objects in Los Angeles through May 29th.