VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Inman Gallery presents the exhibitions Tommy Fitzpatrick: Dematerializing and Nina Bovasso: New Paintings.

Inman offers up work by Tommy Fitzpatrick in the main gallery, and new paintings by Nina Bovasso in the north gallery.

Tommy Fitzpatrick was born in 1969 in Dallas, Texas. He received his B.A., Fine Arts, from The University of Texas,Austin, TX and his M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking, from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. He also attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

Tommy currently lives and works in Arlington, Texas.

Repetition is all for Nina Bovasso. In her cheerfully obsessive semi-abstract drawings, and in her small paintings, whose dominant colors are red, white, blue and pink, dots of varying sizes accumulate into spheres of varying densities. They can suggest brains, planets or atoms overburdened with molecules, but they can also coalesce into fizzy, confetti-like clouds.

Thin lines form thick, springy tangles around these aggregate forms, or strike out on their own, widening into looping crisscrossing bands reminiscent of thruway cloverleafs or bright crisscrossing highways. Small squarish units, which evoke both bricks and houses, multiply into citylike pueblos and tear-shaped subdivisions. Finally, there are paintings in which short bands of color cover the surface edge to edge, like a patchwork quilt.

In bits and pieces, these elements are all appealing; but put together in slightly different ways, over the course of many drawings, they become not only relentless but also rather vacant and decorative. Cuteness and comic allusion can make abstraction seem user friendly and more closely tied to the culture at large, but it doesn't necessarily make it more meaningful. In the end, eye candy is just another kind of formalism.
ROBERTA SMITH in the New York Times.

Pictured: Tommy Fitzpatrick, Dematerializing, 2008 acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 inches