Standards

Describing a work by what it isn't is rarely germane, but it would seem to be the best way to approach Nauman Humayun's newest painting, a subtly subversive, Op Art-derived network of banded color, torqued around a set of axes just off to the side of Cartesian coordinate space. There are feints toward the metaphysics of multiple worlds, but Humayun seems less interested in the quantum science of n-dimensional space as such than in its politics.

The signposts of Op Art are the most apparent feature of the work-- color as a marker of illusionistic space, line as a map around one's field of vision--but there would be little worth discussing if that were it. The coloration is almost flatly complementary, but not quite; they're tweaked enough to flatten out the vibrations between them, so that individual bands of color lie flatly atop, or crash into, one another. Instead of an overall patterned field, the work can be read from left to right, from a more open, conventional, symmetrical geometry on the left, coming to a knot in the middle, and spit back in widening rays off to the right. Lines cut through and intersect at oblique angles, calling conceptually to a path or map, but rendered impossible to follow; instead, one ping-pongs from area to area around the painting. There are breaks and gaps along the way, and errant splotches and pronounced brush strokes to break up the expected flat, graphic surface. It's bordered at the front by a set of dangling electrical cords, powering lights ringing the top border, so a direct approach is impossible, and one must flank the painting, or sneak up on it.

It's always seemed to your correspondent that Op Art is a pretension to universality, that by treating the eye to a pleasing, non-representative illusion, one can get past toxic, divisive ideology and connect, in some way, with a collective spirit; that it's somehow supposed to be a direct bridge to the Geist, and that this is an escape from the world we understand that's worth making. But here, it seems, is a rejoinder to that idea, that somehow this great metaphysical leap should never be so simple, or that a painting would never be enough. If there's an issue to be taken with the work, the most glaring one is that the ideology at play here is thoroughly anti-, or at the very least that whatever positive stance it might take is buried so far underneath the din on the surface that it's impenetrable; without this positive stance, what it is versus what it isn't, the ideas at play lose some of their power. In this case, though, that's a relatively minor point. The ability to twist this neat, non-argumentative utopianism back into something like a critical space is a novel, and too-rare, talent.

Nauman Humayun's work is currenty on display on the 3rd floor graduate studios, Visual Arts Building, at the Pennsylvania State University.