Nice Color and Nice Shapes

Holly Coulis at Phillip Martin Gallery

Review of Holly Coulis’s Song at Phillip Martin Gallery

Holly Coulis’s paintings have an indelible sharpness, nice colors, and nice shapes. They resemble hard-edge abstraction except her brushstrokes—wide bands of scumbled but tightly controlled paint—belie the painter's hand. They evince control, preconception, and intentionality. They almost might as well be taped off and machine made. A part of me wonders, actually, why even introduce this element of the “hand of the artist” when the results seem so fore-ordained and hard-edged anyway: to show off? The elements of still-life and representation from her earlier paintings are mostly gone except insofar as the titles allude to them. The shapes here are larger and bolder but ultimately more generic.