LIVELY ARTS

Steve Miller has made a name for himself among those artists whose works assault the way art and culture can be reduced to a seductively packaged commodity. In Network, his first one-man show in New York, held in 1982, he covered gallery walls with printed text’ and paint, addressing, according to one reviewer, the “black and white truths” generated by the entwined worlds of business and art.

The recent works on exhibit here are mounted in heavy, sleek black frames, reminiscent of cabinetry housing high-tech electronic gadgets. The frames give these works – a combination of oil painting and silk­screen – an imposing authority, and they seem like another form of polished packaging, the sort that Miller both critiques and exploits.

It’s hard to say what one is looking at within these frames, as the artist has created deliberately taxing layers of color and shape. Amorphous blobs splatter across the canvas, sparkling with metallic paint. Painted over these impossible-to-identify shapes are rows of dots carefully placed to give the illusion of television static. Miller deals in seductive magentas, radiant silvers and acid greens, imparting a slick surface to these canvases.

Yet his ultimate goal seems to be to entrap and repel rather than seduce. Untitled #3 is a vertical diptych in which orange dots vibrate over the top panel, blurring a richly colored abstraction made up of splatters and smears that sometimes suggest a laboratory slide. The lower panel features a black, yawning hole, a monstrous mouth inside which a cyclone spins. Much of this black shape is printed over a darkly colorful ground. The glit­tenng splashes of paint here are more threatening than decorative, perhaps suggesting toxic spills.

Despite their undeniable power, these works sometimes betray such a self-conscious technique that they are undone by the calculating spirit they seek to expose.