TRANSFORMATIVE PAINTING: THE RECENT WORK OF MAGGIE CHOW

BY Mat Gleason

Los Angeles-based art writer, critic and curator

August 29, 2020

The energy in the recent paintings of Maggie Chow is effusive. But a viewer is wiser to understand that the joy these pictures share is deliberate. The frenzied brush strokes are defined by layered color and applied in a disciplined order. Nothing is not where it should be, adding the sublime sense of ecstasy that this work conveys.

This is abstraction with a defined rhythm and a sense of place. Not particularly autobiographical, they do reflect the colors and spatial sense of her relocation from Los Angeles to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. While these are a bit too close to pure abstraction to be seen as abstracting from nature, the light, color, and topography of her new home have obviously seeped into the work - to its benefit and to the enjoyment of the audience.

Operating in the same formal space as Sean Scully and the recent few decades’ output of Brice Marden, the work has a compositional substructure based on line loaded with color. Chow’s delineating lines are bulbous enough to be seen as passages of pictorial space. Contemplative observation reveals that this space is inevitably both coming from and leading to somewhere - the hallmark of line as a formal element.

This transformation of meaning at the basic compositional level of a picture is a radical approach to painting. Chow constructs the lines in her paintings to excel as the carrier of pictorial content instead of just the delineator of space. Breakthroughs like this happen maybe once in a career if at all, but the freedom and inventiveness at which she is operating in this work indicates radical new forms may be on the horizon.