LOS ANGELES
Tim Forcum: “Complications of Nature” at d.e.n. contemporary

Viewing Tim Forcum’s most recent series of abstract oil paintings is a bit like watching a professor work out a math problem right in front of you. Forcum’s predilection for crisply rendered solid ovoid shapes and tubular connective tissue has inspired choreographed maneuvers between intersecting elements that seemed to glide across flat canvas surfaces like lily pads on a pond. The new paintings are both the same and different. They retain his quirky palette of pea soup green, dark chestnut brown, bright sky blue, fresh mint and fleshy peach, but these are now used in executing more attenuated forms. There is a new prevalence of line drawing, mostly in either black or white, and of negative spaces and hollow forms rather than opaque ovals and limbs that generate deeper pictorial space and depth. What makes this particularly engaging is that every work in the show contains some level of evidence of the transition, or traces of compromise and inspiration, experiment and fusion, that when viewed as a whole offer a dynamic insight into the artist’s thinking.

The piece entitled Complications of Nature (all works 2008), for example, still employs a predominance of solid shapes. Painted black, white, gray and maroon, its crescents, rhomboids and tubular shapes are draped with a filigree of icing: here in green, there in lavender. The directions begin to diverge in this work and the split is apparent. In Read Between the Lines, one sees the next step beyond. In its three distinct sets of hoses, simple black, white and blue palette, and relative lack of solid shapes blocking their sinewy progress, this composition has stronger spatial recession, and the lines are taking over. In these compositions, Forcum’s work becomes graphic rather than shapely, evoking circuitry rather than solidity, vines rather than rock formations, calligraphy rather than mosaic. In de angels, elements of what could be a peach-and-black forest amidst swirling dust of snow radiates energy as the shapes condense into lines. The result is curiously anthropomorphic. On the whole, Forcum’s work is more gestural and painterly whereas previously he exercised greater control, making clean edges and so forth. But, along with this loosening of his compositional structure, there’s also a looseness to his brushwork that in context seems confident rather than decadent, like improvisation in jazz, which is the reward for mastering the rules first.