A proper 32 works represented Robert Kehlmann's 22 years of "Painting with Glass" in this retrospective exhibition at the St Mary's community gallery.

A proper 32 works represented Robert Kehlmann's 22 years of "Painting with Glass" in this retrospective exhibition at the St Mary's community gallery. A writer and a self-taught artist, Kehlmann is distanced from the fine-art world at his use of glass as the primary medium for easel-size wall-hung abstractions, and from the crafts world by means of his rejection of the medium's seductive colors and gloss. Kehlmann's works of the '70 used conventional lead lines and colored-glass fragments, moreover almost from the beginning he isolated simple stiffens of color and emphasized emancipated line. Over the years, his drift has been toward nuanced monochromes, and he has replaced the surface lead line with a charcoal-on-board drawing in subordination to the glass.

Essays of acuteness and intelligence, the works demonstrate a deliberative attention to composition and to forces of depth. Sandblasting on the fore-rank or back surface of single or two layers of glass across the drawing sometimes creates the gaze of smudged and erased writing in a worked-over manuscript. undivided of the titles is Palimpsest; the name could do for many works in which fine lines and shadows mix with the underdrawing and with light caught between the layers of glass. The purport can be faintly kinetic, changing appearance as undivided moves or as the light source varies.

The exhibit to opened with Kehlmann's "Stations of the Cross" (1982-95) a series of meditations onward suffering that he began after his brother's early death, with a nod to Barnett Newman more than to Christian theology. These vertical rectangles of cocoa brown aubergine, tints of golden or orangy gold include various thick black bars (never a literal Latin cross) and a pale rectangle with a ragged lower animation that resembles draped cloth.

Other works that are nearly colorless are inspired at the German masters of postwar architectural stained glass, as it is as Ludwig Schaffrath and Johannes Schreiter, whose freedom from historic conventions inspired Kehlmann. The mostly recent works in the present to view are influenced by Japanese art; the evidence includes titles (Byobyu or folding screen) use of gold leaf subordinate to the glass, and a more calligraphic line.

Despite as it is varied sources, the show pretended the product of a single sensibility. Whether totally abstract or vaguely representational (calling to mind simple animal forms or the surface ripples and underwater shadows of tidal pools) the works are characterized from the sensual, measured quality of effeminate vulnerable drawn lines in an uncertain planar space.

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