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| Andrew Keating Andrew Keating's latest exhibition has secured his position among Seattle painters as an artist of unique personal vision, consummate control over color, and an abundant satirical imagination. In a city where abstraction has been the predominant mode of the past decade, Keating stands alone as a representational artist who also meets head-on the pictorial challenges his more formalist colleagues have called their own. These concerns are what unites his work with theirs. The black-and-white acrylic on paper pieces (Cool Jerk. Poster) continue Keating's playful assault on perspective, a tactic seen in greater depth at the 31-year-old artist's spring debut at the Seattle Art Museum's Modern Art Pavilion. The new color works hit hard at viewers' prejudices against shades we might be more comfortable with in the boudoir: creamy pastels and contrasts like pink and yellow, red and purple. The eight color paintings extend these experiments even further than the earlier watercolor series wherein peach, aqua, salmon and seafoam green were used to depict single figures in outlandish "American scene" settings. Now, Keating pushes more sickly sweet color combinations at us and, once again, succeeds in using them to reinforce his savagely witty content. In some of his pictures, people calmly sinking into quicksand smile at the viewer, while in others, drowning swimmers (a recurrent theme) stretch out their arms more in a gesture of farewell than alarm. Solitary figures in landscape or interior settings (also seen in freestanding painted plywood cut-outs) carry the message of the artist's ambiguously humorous world. Superficially, this bemused quality and his use of flattened-out, stick-figures link Keating to Jim Nutt and Jean Dubuffet as well as to that whole realm of American painting concerned with grotesque comedy. Such comparisons, however, are inadequate. As this exhibition amply demonstrates, Keating differs from these other artists in his exultant attitude toward a broader color spectrum and in his obsessive interest in intricate border and field patterns. His bi-chromatic pieces set up vibrating optical patterns around tattooed or scarred faces and generate a disturbing sensation that is never present in, for example, Dubuffet. Additionally, unlike Nutt, Keating’s humanist sympathies are almost Whitmanesque. Even though the subjects of this Pennsylvania-born artist include creepy insects attacking beleaguered figures (Bugs), flabby husbands and wives with missing fingers and mismatched facial parts (Dancers), and men whose valentine-hearts and nipples nave been excised (Cut Out), his color choices and smooth, glowing paint application sharply separate him from his grimmer Chicago counterparts. What Keating also gives us is a zany commentary on ear1y modern painting. His work includes, among other things, jokey references to Picasso's lberian mask period and Matisse's "Red Interior With Blue Table". We're left with a sensation of upbeat clashing colors which are used to depict strange, often dismaying events. The essence of Keating’s sense of humor is in his triumphant balancing of disparate factors.
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