3-Sentence Reviews: Keltie Ferris, for Starters

Photo courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Keltie Ferris: “Paintings and Body Prints”
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Through Oct. 17

About eight years ago Keltie Ferris burst onto the New York painting scene like a bat out of hell, that is, if you define hell as the Yale M.F.A. painting program; back then, her large Day-Glo-colored canvases were perfect crosses between hazy 1970s Color Field painting, pixilated digital space breaking up and reforming in odd-shaped plates, and painterly abstraction at the same time totally avoiding any derivative overlap with artists like Kelly Walker or Gerhard Richter. A lot of people took notice; but then she seemed to plateau a little, get a bit predictable, following the digital implications of her work in directions that seemed too logical, illustrative, resulting in pictures that were contrived and overly self-conscious. That temporary stall is behind her; Ferris is her own artist now, really simmering-to-boil in this new show that mixes images that look like traditional weaving, fizzling idiosyncratic patterns, digital imprints left by unknown ghosts, painterly reflexes that are as instinctive as an animal alert to where to move and what to do in a limited field, and how to survive, and kill.