Now go the other on the continuum beyond sensibility while expunging concept and what remains? I call this design. Now design, even ornamentation, needs to be thoughtfully approached to be visually pleasing and I’ll concede that both include remnants of the something conceptual. But they are also completely self-referential in a way that art is not.  From my P.O.V. art must always have meaning to be art; that is, reference(s) beyond itself no matter how purely consumed by esthetics.

The continuum I suggest is very wide with plenty of room for variation.  Throughout art history you can see where artists have pushed toward either concept or sensibility. Among the New York School artists I think of the range between the cerebral reductive esthetic of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman versus the emotion that drives de Kooning’s, Pollock’s and Rothko’s paintings.  Both sensibility and concept are manifest to varying degree in all of these artists’ work.  But also, neither is ever entirely absent no matter how hard the extremes are pushed.

In this marvelous show the paintings seem to fairly leap off the walls and get right into your face.  This begins with a energetic treatment of space in the form of an illusion produced by a play on light and shadow that occurs between most of the forms.  An overwhelming sensation of abstract 3 dimensional planes is created which is so profound that these pieces seem to read as wall sculpture projecting out into the gallery.

Thornton Willis, Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Thornton Willis also sneaks in a maverick painting composed of yellow, black and red triangles where, unlike the other work, the lines separating them are white instead of black.  There are other  differences too. The forms are distinguished for a flattened out, graphic handling of space as compared to other paintings. The piece also stands out  for the placement of a line that more or less consistently divides it vertically while another divides it diagonally.  Now this is dangerous stuff.  Such even symmetry is possessed of great visual power but Willis skillfully