Ireland, Haynes and Zecca: three creative postures

[...] the Telegraph Hill Gallery brings an unfamiliar selection of Ireland’s frameable works, mostly from the 1990s, into public view from the estate of one of the artist’s siblings.

Critics cite Ireland (1930-2009) as a leading figure in Bay Area conceptual art.

Several other pages, layered with black and white enamel, bring to mind the abstract meanders of painter Brice Marden, until a viewer notices that the initials D and I slowly, but wryly, unignorably begin to obtrude as armatures of Ireland’s ostensibly non-signifying features.

Ireland liked to toy with the convention of the artist’s signature, especially because his initials were an anagram of “I.D.” — all-but-universal slang for identity.

Several beguiling monotypes pay homage to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), an acknowledged hero of Ireland’s, apparently having been made by dropping pigment-soaked strings onto a page or plate, letting the physics of their falls dictate what we perhaps strain to see as composition.

A single sculptural work betokens the opposite pole of Ireland’s creativity: the exercise of extreme discipline to achieve a desired degree of impersonality.

Small, coolly brushed abstractions, consisting of little but gradations of hue and value that produce illusions of fugitive light, they seem to whisper of the depth of studio experience that lies behind them.

Studying “Yesterday (from the 'ma’ series)” (2013-14), a viewer can sense the pressure of the brush on the surface, gauge its load of pigment where first and last touches show for what they are, feel their micro-level merger with strokes already laid down: sensations that not even the most faithful reproduction can simulate.

With contemporary culture’s ceaseless crossfire of digressions as background, that sense of abandonment within the merely real can produce, at least for a moment, something like the auratic engagement Benjamin (1892-1940) imagines as possible, even modal, before the camera age.

Zecca has long relied on the unpredictable optical effects of unnumbered pigmented ink lines ruled on surfaces with straight edges.

Methodical to a degree that most studio practitioners would probably find maddening, Zecca’s abstractions have continued to generate results that, at least occasionally, must surprise him as much as anyone else.

Yet it was never merely a look but the expression of an iron commitment, and some quotient of compromise seems to threaten pieces that seem too arbitrarily varied.

Collaging segments of striated sheets has worked for Zecca in the past, and does here in a piece identified merely by “2015 32 x 28,” whose faceted tiers of inked chevrons flicker between stark abstraction and visions of a cityscape of crystalline inhumanity.