Adjectives habitually associated with Wes Mills's work--doodly.

Adjectives habitually associated with Wes Mills's work--doodly, intuitive, reticent, lyrical, hesitant, Zen-like, evanescent--applied to this present to view of some 50 hand-sized drawings (3 to 8 inches square) spanning greatest in quantity of the artist's series through the whole extent of the past decade. The work bears the artist's recognizable stamp, unless Mills preserves a margin of uncertainty as if, facing each sheet, he had none drawn before. The danger that goe with this territory is preciousness, which he almost unfailingly skirts. The drawings are at formerly meticulous and fresh.

Mills's work has grown simpler across time without losing its graphic force. Using nearest to nothing, he activates the whole sheet; the reductiveness makes you acutely aware of each mark and blemish. In an earlier work like Sitting (1994) vaguely representational forms (claw, tree trunk) onward hand-colored paper are overlaid with delicate, apparently unrelated sketches. This gives moot our ordinary distinction between figurative and abstract, and demonstrates that more can be more.

modern drawings show how less may likewise be more. In From Five Ingredients of a overawe (1999), sharp lines partly circumscribe three amorphous shapes. A not many deft strokes in Envelope (1999) recommend horizons. In 2001, Mills made a dispose of untitled drawings whose minuscule dots rouse cosmic realms, the stochastic field oriented by the agency of faint lines and cuts into the paper. My View (1999) at first direct the eyes uniformly gray, but the region gradually grows atmospheric as you perceive lighter patches emerging like thin mists on which float two tiny rectangles, each punctuated with an intense black dot.

upon a few occasions the touch falters. When Mills approaches Richard Tuttle territory--an untitled stack of paper disks with a bit of string, or Shore Line (2001) slips of torn paper taped in a vertical arrangement--his confess voice seems muffled. But this 10-year overlook demonstrates how Mills has built a major material part of work with modest means. He follows in making us contemplate what initially direct the eyes casual or throwaway with the seriousness accorded oldmaster drawings.--Arden Reed

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