![]() Many cleanly duck out when emotion stirs-some have dipped a toe into writing about how the work emotes while simultaneously edging out of the pool, maintaining the feigned critical remove expected of the (male) academic. I’m not the first critic to wrestle with Stark’s tug of war between politic, emotion, and the world of symbols. Moody Rothkos these are not-quite the contrary. In making them, she slowly adds layer upon layer, building up low-relief, sculptural surfaces that create lifelike skin textures and glowing halos with perfect, emojilike symmetry. Her flawless paint application is bounce-a-coin-off-a-bed tight-a single work sometimes takes the artist years to execute. Stark’s paintings accomplish an orchestra of feeling with minimal moves, clean graphics, and overly-calculated brushstrokes. The paintings are deployed with the calculated precision that you might associate with the opposite of feeling or sentimentality- such as Peter Halley’s paintings, which prize harsh accuracy over embodied feeling. In it, hearts abound in both predictable and curious ways: purple hearts, bleeding hearts, candy box hearts, sacred hearts. (Jaded is the default attitude one strikes in the social space of the art gallery about nearly everything.)”¹ Yet, nothing in me wishes to be jaded about the tender emotionality palpable in Linda Stark’s new show, Hearts, at David Kordansky Gallery. Doyle remarks that “there is a false assumption in much art writing that we can be smart about emotions only if we are being cynical about them. ![]()
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