CAREN GOLDEN FINE ART

Paul Henry Ramirez at Caren Golden
Art in America, Dec, 2007 by Nancy Princenthal

If previous figures of comparison for Paul Henry Ramirez included Aubrey Beardsley and Lari Pittman, his current work triangulates Carroll Dunham and Ellsworth Kelly. Buoyant, funny, sharp but not so it hurts, Ramirez's new paintings, individually and collectively called "Chunk," are as close to erotica as hard-edged abstraction gets. Bouncing across fields of bright color bound by smartly angled contours and tidy curves are paired balls of every size. Straight lines shoot out between them. Gone are the hairy, furry or cloudy (if always meticulous) passages of previous work, which sometimes spilled from canvas to wall; the crisp lines and fetishistically smooth acrylic surfaces of the paintings in "Chunk" speak of a certain belief in the perfectibility of form. But they are considerably too raunchy to suit abstraction's more resolute purists.

Ranging in size from 36 to 66 inches square, the numbered compositions (all 2007) include the bilaterally symmetrical 4, in which two pairs of testicular forms nestle against the ample curves of pendulous white lozenges set against a field of sunny green, the whole bisected by a big black bar. Numbers 2 and 3 are even more explicitly sexual, the latter a semaphore-like image of crossed phalluses in two shades of pinkish red, the former an elegantly bold icon in matte black that could serve as international signage for a certain kind of intimacy.

In other compositions, though, smaller circles and narrower lines, some in glittery graphite gray, carom across straight-edged declivities to less suggestive effect. Occasionally, stray gestures familiar from earlier work, including thin striped accents in day-glo pink and orange and little peaked dollops of candy-colored paint, sweeten the imagery. A three-lobed black form set at a jaunty angle in the nested white and yellow fields of 6 vaguely suggests Mickey Mouse--and, even more generally, childhood's innocent enthusiasms. And in all these paintings, the palette, dominated by bright primaries, as much as the squeaky-clean delineation of form, pulls against associations to flesh and its pleasures. Still, the point is made.

Discreetly but distinctly, "Chunk" also invokes a specific pop-cultural moment--roughly, the early '60s--when game theory was a favored way of looking at personal relations, jazz was represented on record covers with heavily abstracted bongo drums and the Pink Panther was the cat's meow. Covetable for their stylishness and formal satisfactions as well as their wholesome sexiness, these paintings are one more blow to geometric abstraction's foundations in spiritual quest and moral rigor. Myron Stout probably wouldn't be amused and Barnett Newman surely appalled, but, for more jaded--or more tolerant--21st-century eyes, "Chunk" is hard to resist. -Nancy Princenthal