CAKEWALK
Winter 1999
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out. Timothy Leary
Once a spiritual and revolutionary catch-phrase, this mantra by the 60's LSD guru became an anthem for a generation seeking to tap into the potential of the human mind to reach higher states of eons conspicuousness, as well as reject the constraints of middle America. Though today, viewed as a humorous anachronism of that decade's excesses and naiveté, Leary's chant and its related cultural associations are nonetheless resurrected by the intense glowing halos of Steve Heyman's enveloping abstract paintings.
In a previous decade Heyman's elastic designs would have been seen in the context of "acid" art, backdrops for tripping on LSD that like the optical effects of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", were meant to take the baby boomers on a "good trip" - a self-indulgent, psychedelic orgasm of color and movement that saw spiritual discovery linked with sexual ecstasy. Yet, the more obvious retro-associations generated by Heyman's paintings are intertwined with the rigorous formal histories of Color Field and Op-Art painting, revealing the complexities of Heyman's practice and the significance of his achievement - the merging of low and high cultural sources into a conceptual and formal synthesis that is a reflection of its own time.
A master at producing vibrating color fields whose over-the-top optical intensity is actually the result of observations of real-life sources involving the physical transformation of matter, such as the pouring of molten steel. This mid-career Chicago artist echoes Leary's call by pulling the viewer into large-scale, amorphous vortexes that are designed to detach one from familiar spatial groundings. Working with a palette that evokes the white-yellows and red-oranges of blast furnaces and the cold blues that serve as the border between earth's atmosphere and deep space, Heyman achieves a sense of infinite spatial depth and blinding hot-spots of light through a labor-intensive process of acrylic glazing that leaves no trace of the artist's hand. A refinement descendant of the stainings of Morris Louis, Heyman's glazes extend the luminous possibilities begun by Louis's signature veils of color by emitting an intense inner light whose substantial presence is seemingly more solid than void when viewed up close.
It is the optical aggressiveness of Heyman's light sources, and the reflective sheen of his surfaces that elevates his work beyond a nostalgic pastiche of past voices and places it firmly in the present. Not willing to be passive contemplative back-drops, Heyman's animated paintings appear to lunge forward, their amoebae-shaped hotspots resembling neon lariats to lasso one's senses while their glossy surfaces place the shadow of one's body literally in the painting. In works such as Pouring, the lethal beauty of white-hot liquid steel becomes a dangerous seductress as Heyman's fiery composition implies that any prolonged exposure will burn out one's retinas. In this case, "tuning in" has lethal consequences as Heyman reveals the '90's path to ecstasy is informed by a harsh dose of reality.
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