Joe Macca: Oregonian review by Chas Bowie

PORTLAND & OREGON ART
Art reviews: Joe Macca at PDX Contemporary

Chas Bowie
October 23, 2009, 3:14AM

Hazy tones and ethereal wisps Joe Macca makes luscious, old-fashioned abstract paintings, yet he manages to do so without feeling stubbornly old-fashioned. In "MellowDrama," his sixth solo show at PDX Contemporary Art, the Mulino painter further extends his lyrical study of hazy tonal gradations and ethereal wisps of color with 14 square paintings.

Using paint as an almost atmospheric element, Macca's new pieces depict glowing fields of color -- indigo, squash, salamander and dusky rose -- converging on the brush-free painting surfaces. Although his formal choices derive from the flora and fauna of his rural environment, Macca's paintings speak more to the nature of vision and perception. Blurry compositions such as "Rabbit" and "Tolovana" look like nothing so much as the patterns of colored light that emerge after rubbing one's eyes, while "Bee/Symbiate" and "Flicker/Symbiate" evoke an infantile visual acuity, in which the world is perceived as an unfocused field of contrasts and colors.

By most measures, Macca's work would not feel out of place in the Clement Greenberg collection of midcentury Modernism. Legions of artists have returned to abstract painting in the past 15 years, although many have done so with agnostic caution, approaching the loaded tradition with the wariness of an "X-Files" agent: "I want to believe." Macca makes no bones about his faith in formal purity, but with his allusions to optical perception and color theory the artist invokes a provocative conversation, cloaked in luminescent subtleties.

Joe Macca, "MellowDrama," PDX Contemporary Art, 925 N.W. Flanders St.; 503-222-0063, pdxcontemporaryart.com. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; free admission

-- Chas Bowie, Special to The Oregonian