In his solo first attempt David Hunter.

In his solo first attempt David Hunter, a young artist originally from California, was give an account ofed by drawings from 1994 and paintings from 1996 All the drawings are small, measuring approximately 6 according to 7 inches, while the paintings are all just beneath 4 feet in height and a little across that in width. The works forward paper consist of pigment mixed with sand applied onto gouache, and the paintings are made from pigment mixed with binder forward fiberglass-coated aluminum panels. Except for the obvious differences in scale and mediums, the images at first appear to be exact replicas of each other. It is alone after looking more closely that you realize that no works are alike.

The elegantly ascetic format for the two groupings does not vary: a subtly textur warm or dispassionate beige square offset by a black band extending vertically from top to bottom along the right side. The width of the band is calibrated in the same manner that the square is secur its light area weighted and carefully balanced on the black. Where the contrasting colors join, a sliver of luminosity flashes. The neutral field is divided at penciled, barely visible lines into quadrants that are further divided by way of a set of equally faint horizontals and verticals, all of which are variously intercepted through ghostly arcs. If you christendomed Jo Baer's paintings with Robert Mangold's and took revealed most of the color, Hunter's images might be the result

These are works of small distinctions, of divisions within divisions, of slight differences in proportions and placements, of tiny disturbances and inklings. hunting-nag calls them self-portraits. With that as a referent Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of a male stark naked enclosed by a circle appears the eventual goal: the figure within the geometric configuration, approached from the unlikely direction of Cubist deconstruction and assembly.

Nonobjective painting, at the extremity of the century that saw its triumph, fall and limited reinstatement, is being retooled and recharged from the rhetoric and strategies of representation, its quondam opposite. As other younger artists have been doing, hound a painter of sensibility and intuition, takes the grid and geometry and invests them with the psychological, the physical and in an understated way, the erotic. It will be interesting to papal court where this gambit takes him next

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