Nick Gaetano's Break it on Down

Artists make their marks

December 6, 2006
By JENNY BLOCK / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
The current exhibition at Marty Walker Gallery, featuring the work of Nick Gaetano, Quintin Gonzalez, Angela Kallus and Zane Lewis, is about paint and process.
Mr. Gaetano pours, layers and drags the paint across his canvases. The result is a study in patterning and repetition. "Like an attempt at record-keeping," says the gallery owner. "A stacking-up, an accounting, or mark-making. It's obsessive."
Mr. Gonzalez, too, pours paint. But unlike Mr. Gaetano, Mr. Gonzalez allows the paint to puddle and swirl and pool. The result is psychedelic. Brilliant colors snake toward the viewer in Laughing Polymers and sweep over and around the canvas in Corruption Gentle Master.
Ms. Kallus uses paint to create bull's-eye reliefs. Her palette invokes penny-candy store finds and visits from the ice-cream truck. The pieces are full of movement, spinning within the borders of rich, gray backgrounds.
Mr. Lewis, who earlier this year was noted in a Wall Street Journal article headlined "23-Year-Old Masters," creates paint-by-number canvases made from photographs of natural water features.
What all of this work does is initiate dialogue, an eclectic and electric one, between artist and paint, between painting and viewer, and among the works themselves.
Four photographs by Matthew Porter are showing in an auxiliary gallery and serve as an interesting complement. His shots feature classic muscle cars, mostly captured in midair as if in an action movie. Ms. Walker makes the connection herself: What all of the pieces exhibit is a "carefully orchestrated illusion of spontaneity."   Jenny Block is a Dallas freelance writer.

"Struggle Ain't Got No Color," paintings by Nick Gaetano, Quintin Gonzalez, Angela Kallus and Zane Lewis, continues through Dec. 30 at Marty Walker Gallery, 2135 Farrington St. Hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and by appointment. Free. 214-749-0066, www.martywalkergallery.com.