Buffalo, NY
There are people who doodle, and people who don’t. Thomas S. Coyne, I’m betting, belongs to the former category. His marginalia, however, refuse to stay on the border of the page. They jump up, grow large, and take their rightful place at the center of Coyne’s tart, mottled canvases. Actually, they don’t just sit in the middle, they multiply and spread out until they reach the edges where they first began. In paintings like “Sprawl” and “Sprawl II,” they take on hard-edge geometric shapes then cluster and layer until something half like a city, half like a maximalist Hans Arp picture emerges. In “Green Eggs” they ooze and split, congeal and settle, like bubble letters with something too organic and vibrant to say. Coyne’s paintings use color and form to speak for the scraps left on the floor, for the negative space between the letters. All the viewer has to do is learn to listen.
—Lori Waxman 11/12/16 1:59 PM