artREVIEW
Color explosion
Eric Sall takes gobs of paint and pattern to new levels
By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star

Eric Sall’s “Teeth & Tentacles,” above, and “New Wave: Domestication,” at left, are part of his exhibit of new paintings, “The State I Am In,” at Dolphin. 
E ric Sall is a dynamite painter.
The prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York thought so. It awarded the 1999 Kansas City Art Institute graduate a $20,000 painters and sculptors grant in 2004.
In the last year several new paintings by Sall have popped up in local group shows, whetting anticipation for “Eric Sall: The State I Am In.” That one-person exhibit recently opened at Dolphin.
Seven mostly large canvases find Sall continuing his trademark engagement with the material properties of paint, stacking and scraping, and pulling his brush through thick daubs of the stuff. He splatters it with Pollockian abandon, spackles solids over multicolored fields and coaxes it into dots, stripes and checkerboards.
Shape as well as pattern plays a role in these new paintings that incorporate references to geometry, architecture, landscape and past and present abstraction.
Created during his first year in the graduate program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where, he says, he has gotten lots of input from instructors, it’s an uneven show. Some canvases feel overdone, others fall a bit flat.
Sall characterizes it as a “transitional body of work.”
“A lot of those paintings I had in my studio through (the) school year and reworked them and discussed them a lot with different people,” he said. “With so much input, I was really over-thinking everything.
“My paintings work best for me when I let myself go and get back to my instincts and intuition.”
Sall did that this summer, when he produced “Teeth & Tentacles.”
It’s terrific.
Broad, multicolored bands of paint shoot out and curve back into the congested center of a composition that suggests an exploding abstracted still life. A greasy black background gives extra pop to the dynamic central form, which features rows of toothy scallops, like malevolent maws or picot edging, along the bands of color.
Arguably the exhibit’s crowning achievement, the painting was snapped up by well-known Kansas City art collector Dean Thompson before the show opened.
Sall similarly got “back to what felt right to me” in “Balls Out,” a no-holds barred expression of painterly ebullience. Above a spackly white and magenta lower zone, a hinged shape supports a blizzard of imploding colored bands as buoyant circles of color bump against the top and sides of the white-painted upper left quadrant.
“New Wave: Domestication” feels staid by comparison, but then, almost anything would. “New Wave” is classic Sall: Four impastoed pylons rise from a black-and-white checkered “floor” to support a multicolored tilted rectangle, over-painted white and topped with a wedge of black-and-white stripes. Running down the right side, a stripe of pink contributes an illusion of shallow space.
Several paintings depart from these iconic compositions of burly central forms.
“Rainbow Blizzard (Chromatic Whiteout)” reads as an abstract landscape. The spirits of Color Field painters Larry Poons and Gene Davis seem to converse within it, as a flurry of white lozenges of varying viscosity travel up an incline formed by diagonal colored stripes across the lower edge.
Urged by his instructors, Sall experimented with a more minimalist approach in several paintings, including the 78-by-12-inch canvas “Edgy Edifice.” He doesn’t completely buy it, however. Yes, the design is minimal, with its large gray and black cubic shape that veers up from the lower right. But the gobby Abstract Expressionist drips of color that careen across its surface break minimalism’s rules, as do the pentimenti of links and dots that lurk beneath the composition’s gray background.
The most daring piece in the show is the smallest canvas, “Light & Magic,” in which Sall forgoes his usual muscular brushwork for an atmospheric haze of gray, magenta, yellow, turquoise and orange, banded at the bottom by a series of narrow horizontal white stripes and surrounded by a scalloped edging of impastoed semicircles of solid color.
It’s an unsettling work that also offers reassurance that Sall is an artist who won’t give in to formula.
“This (show) felt more like uncharted water for me,” Sall said. “I can be risky and try some things I’m not sure about. It felt like a fun show.”
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On display 
“Eric Sall: The State I Am In” continues at Dolphin, 1901 Baltimore, through Oct. 1. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call (816) 842-5877 for information.