Don Van Vliet
Michael Werner | New York
Set off by the front gallery’s Biedermeier proportions, bathed by the softly filtered southern light, Don Van Vliet’s semi-automatic abstractions looked beautiful, neurasthenic, old-fashioned, and European. Here and there, the artist’s organic palette and willfully skittish, stubbily fingered surfaces reminded me of Georg Baselitz’s “Hero” paintings from the ’60s, which were seen in this very space two seasons ago. Cactus Blanch and Wrought Iron Cactus, both 1991, with their veggie-juice-bar colors and implied metamorphoses, are both cases in point. I got the feeling that Van Vliet jabbed paint