Thoughts That Cure Radically: Terry Winters ‘Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook’ Matthew Marks Gallery

Studio isolation delineates the work of Terry Winters. Eleven large, ambitiously scaled paintings colored Valentine’s Day pink, ice-cold blue, tangerine green and a russet orange stand in sparkling, lonely tension at Matthew Marks Gallery. Heroically measured and reaching upwards of nine feet, Winters work still manages to come across as neither proudly confident nor particularly poised. Based around the compositional strategy of tessellation, or the repeated and non-overlapping form across a two dimensional plane, Winters creates a dynamic but fraught picture structure. Fussy and pinched, each picture is based around a strict but yet still intuitively arrived pictorial arrangement. Freely painted without a clear regard for crisp edges, each segment is all scumbled glazes and erasures, showing clear signs of second thoughts and addendums.

Winters work does not have the arid calm of an Islamic tile or the startling simplicity of an irrefutable mathematical proof. Winters’ venture, instead, is a more subtle, personal assignment. Winters’ studio universe, while grandly painted, remains minute. Partaking of the same atelier vision as Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, Winters turns his tessellated and fractal compositional surface into a personal, microscopic vision of an imagined studio. Braque’s Studio X—last seen at Acquevella—shares the same affinity for deep space and scumbled, finicky paint while Matisse’s Red Studio manages—like Winters—to find the iciest frost in the reddest ember. Winters splits the difference between planar and dimensional, creased and delicate, trotted or stumbled. Grasping at clarity, Winters remains alone in a private, tessellated studio.