April 9, 2003

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PLACE A CLASSIFIED AD | PERSONALS | MOVIE CLOCK | REP CLOCK | SEARCH

'Seeking Subtleties' and 'White Paintings'

Through April 19, Hosfelt Gallery

IN SPITE OF its name, minimal sculpture is usually pretty big. The minimalist works of Nelleke Beltjens, however, are charmingly small. Arranged on glass tables, the pieces in "Seeking Subtleties" look almost like maquettes for larger constructions, especially considering they're made out of steel, plaster, concrete, and wood – materials usually associated with full-scale buildings. Beltjens makes their interlocking pieces out of differing substances, most dramatically in her recent wood-and-plaster series. She exerts terrific control over each piece, forming it into precise planes and exact angles, but each one also has a mind of its own, and the plaster always cracks as she carves. Beltjens fills these meandering fissures with pigment and pushes the parts back together, creating the effect of a vein of coal or precious metal running through the earth. Her sculptures are about compatibility on a personal scale – the ways in which individuals can fit together in a relationship despite weaknesses and breaking points. To complement her three-dimensional works, Beltjens has also made several small-scale drawings using rust, pencil, and Thai-red pigment. This last is a goopy, bright-red substance that's viscous enough to defy gravity and make the drawings resemble small-scale sculptures on paper. The blobs behave much like the plaster cracks, dribbling in a way that is controlled but random – just like a real-life relationship! Also featured in the gallery is "White Paintings," by Los Angeles artist Ron Griffin, whose recent paintings and mixed-media works include a fabulous series based on a group of girly pics he found in an abandoned desert trailer. Using an involved photo-transfer process, Griffin applied the images to canvas and then covered them with a semitransparent layer of paint, creating a kind of peep-show teaser-effect that hides as much as it reveals. Tues.-Fri., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 430 Clementina, S.F. (415) 495-5454. (Lindsey Westbrook)