In The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger states, “To be a work means to set up a world,” suggesting that art is a self-reflexive linguistic construct removed from empirical reality. In his later writings, however, Heidegger came to see language as semantically liberating, rather than confining; he looked at art as the manifestation of truth’s becoming, a Dionysian force that calls the phenomenological world into existence.

Don Suggs’ recent paintings adhere to Heidegger’s early critical position, indicting mediation as an obstruction to actual experience. Suggs expresses this obfuscation

Black Absolute, Emerald Pearl, and Red Rose: these are some names of types of granite on which Diane Buckler’s apparitionlike, floating images seem to be delicately etched. (Actually, they’re sandblasted into a photographic emulsion placed against the rectangular, picture-sized chunks of reddish or black polished stone.) Buckler’s unmoored, tilting, and levitating representations of classical statues and retiring nudes, her aerial views of cities and stone cherubs, are presented in gently tumbling, loosened hierarchies buffered by lots of red or black voidlike space. These works have an expansive,

Eric Magnuson uses essentially meaningless phrases to lecture us regarding the problems we face as a trapped art public. In A Typical Whorl (all works, 1989), the words “AMORTALMUST/THINKMORTAL/ANDNOTMMOR/TALTHOUGHTS” are crunched together in four lines on a black background, each block letter illuminated by an overall spiral pattern. Closed Circle (Ransom Note), reads, “Thought submits to the real compulsion of societal debt relations and deluded, claim this compulsion as its own.” The text is done Dada-poster style, in a variety of colors and typefaces. The painted sentence is in the shape of