Austin, TX
7/11/09 11:20 AM
Trick—as the artist Patrick Yang tags himself—is a doodler. But to call him that is not in any way to suggest that his meticulous, exhaustive drawings are done haphazardly, thoughtlessly or in the margins of the page. On the contrary, they reveal all the deliberateness and care of a planned piece, and their all-overness leaves no area of paper unmarked. So what makes them doodles? It’s both content and style. In terms of content, the strange creatures that fill every square inch of space in “The Monster Pattern” are the very stuff of doodling, the kind of smiling amoebas and bug-eyed fish and tentacled heads that come out one end of a pen when the mind is allowed to roam free and silly. In terms of style, the tight, hyper-detailed continuity of “Communication Device I” reveals exactly the kind of imagery that can be generated when some other task is at hand but being assiduously ignored. Both pieces prove surprisingly resilient, for doodles, but worth taking in differently: the monsters reward close looking, which reveals the comic specifics of their obsessive detail, whereas the devices work best taken in all together, their wacky, Seussian linkages clear, their lack of human presence undiscovered.
—Lori Waxman