December 2008, Christopher Pate at Jail Gallery

Peeling back from the lyrical at the last minute, another New York piece cites Warhol’s famous dollar signs and chalk outlines, interlaid with squares of primary color, red, yellow, green, with a bit of Mondrian jazz, evoking suicide jumpers, and emitting an energy of panic perhaps unintended but certainly enhanced by accidents of timing, by the recent Wall Street crisis. Still, despite all that noise, it’s amazing how much it looks like a picture of New York City, not a map of it, with the red lines of major roadways embedded the eerily flesh-tinted landmasses looking for all the world like living tissue in the exposed core of the composition, encircled by peril. Meanwhile, the purported favorite of all the west coast literary types (including this author) was not the sexed-up, seductive, earthquake and movie star monument (though that was a sexy piece) but rather the deceptively straightforward Los Angeles map with nothing but pencil lines drawing modifying it. Its central map of LA is strangely monochrome, even subtle, drawn in that kind blueprint slate tone that’s both textured and cold. This pristine chart is crisscrossed by half a dozen loosely geometrical shapes, arcs mostly, of hurried, frantic, lines, not in webs but in psychotic rainbows. Besides being elegant and expressive, this image perfectly both highlights and obscures and the experience of traversing LA’s highways and byways, elevating it to a formal, economic exercise tracking the energy of a people, rendering it witty and rather beautiful, in a narrative mirror to Abstract Expressionism that transcends the literal and goes beyond the metaphor to become, in its own right, that which it also represents. These maps are not of the place, they are the place; not pointing a way to a place, but embodying the very destination itself.