reviews > Columbus, OH

Heather Reese
Heather Reese

3/06/10 6:39 PM

Heather Reese has a practice as unique as they come: working off her own large-scale abstract paintings, she interprets them both poetically and through dance, performing them into what must be whirlwinds of excitement and surprise. With Passion’s Inevitability she scales back to a modestly sized acrylic canvas and leaves the performance at home — and the verve, too. A thick impasto of red, orange and yellow covers the picture’s surface and makes it satisfyingly dimensional in places, too thin in others. Licks of flame dance across the picture but fail to tower high enough to envelop with the passion promised in the work’s title. Pieces of square orange glitter shimmer here and there but are too few to sparkle the eyes wide open. Without the red-headed artist herself to swirl the painting into life, it needs, oddly enough, to be far smaller, allowing for the intensity which constitutes true passion to be able to express itself in mere paint and glue.

—Lori Waxman