THE Magazine - Los Angeles

In his most recent series, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Mark Dutcher both continues and changes course in his ongoing exegesis of his own memory. In several acclaimed series made over the last several years, Dutcher has repeatedly returned to themes of altar, monument, testimonial, life, death, loss, confession, and expressionist painting. This exhibition's retrospective point of view reveals a narrative arc and outlines a shift in balance: as Dutcher gradually succeeded in his desire to literally to work through the toughest place in his experience, his vision, unshackled, returned to its true love -- abstraction. Pure optical painterliness insinuated itself early on, here and there, into his large-scale memento mori tableaux. Subsequent installations included some completely abstract compositions. And in Havilah he shed it all and staged a complete return to abstraction, embracing it in all its potential for high drama, psychological roller-coastering, and evocative form -- as well as for razzle-dazzle showmanship, humor, and intelligent confection. Large, x-shaped canvases covered in glitter and gold; blocky, squat sculptures in primary colors, stowing eggs and sporting colorful plumage; suspended globes and large canvases covered in high-shine silver -- these and a great many more confounding delights transformed the gallery into a hallucinatory playroom, inverting operations of scale and subverting high and fine painting practice. Smaller works executed in more traditional media revealed an intimacy with paint and a patience with small detail and provided a peek into the compressed raw material of the artist's process. Overall, Dutcher managed to hang on to his well-deserved reputation for exuberance and an appealing vulnerability; but he also let go of overt narrative and the shelter it provided, growing comfortable with ambiguity and risk as his artistry matures.