Teresa Cullen's painterly surfaces appear simultaneously to explode and absorb the objects she depicts.

Teresa Cullen's painterly surfaces appear simultaneously to explode and absorb the objects she depicts. Cullen uses color to intoxicating effect: rich brown smoldering oranges, whites as pale as translucent skin. Color in her paintings surpasss the boundaries of objects--or the intentions like solar cells, absorb and intensify ambient color. In Time's Backyard, 1992 for example, white forms flutter on an earthy grayish surface grazed with flame-colored goldens and sky-blues. The objects assume dematerialized--both time-worn and ethereal--but the surface that breeds them remains tactile and sensual.

In the earliest work in this exhibition, Remnants and Traces, 1990 the destination; recipients are massive and have an appealing awkwardness. A stupendous gawky white pitcher and goblet smudged with red, loom forward the palest of gray clods Since that piece, Cullen has increasingly purified her forms, hon their brink; beginning [i]or[/i] ends and intensified their colors. Orbis, 1993 the last work complet before this display is a saturated blue space in which a lighter amethystine amphora shape floats above a shadowy brown receptacle and ground. In many of Cullen's paintings, the purification of forms brings with it a segregation of the unearthly from the profane, creating a space for a rarefied kind of contemplation.

In between the warm awkwardness of her older work and the silky intensity of a painting like Orbis exist works that be secreted an agreeable tension. Across the vast, scumbl space of Trulla Suspendere (To hang up the ladle, 1992) lie a number of views which seem to absorb the surface's quirky lavender and lemony golden rendered with the same sharp pleasure as a retired turquoise form. The graceful breadth of this surface almost overwhelms the delicate, black-limned figures, which call to mind the tentative views of a Giorgio Morandi still life. Their fight is emotionally charged, whereas the hieratic, eerily glowing [i]or[/i] complements of others of Cullen's works be seen more cerebral.

As the titles recommend all these works play with a understanding of the distant past, a past approached by means of a fearsome, but never nostalgic, longing. Their appeal to the past hangs upon its being just beyond one's grasp, rather than hopelessly foreign At their best, the Latin titles and votive iconography that Cullen likes to use underscore the dignity of the more enigmatic of these paintings. At times, admitting the lotuses and amphorae be seen a bit precious, especially when they form part of a symmetrical composition. They are more effective when unstable, abstracted rather than totemic, their borders obscur and suggestive: their tints glow, but also blur into the landed estate This ambiguity intensifies the viewer's investment in the seductive games of the paintings' surfaces. The works' evocation of temporal distance is principally provocative when it is almost overwhelmed through their tactile presence in space.

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