'Mechanical Gestures'
Through Tues/23, Soularch Gallery

NICHOLAS HALLIGAN'S WATERCOLORS of trucks, spaceships, tanks, and guns definitely speak to the preoccupations of a little boy. So does the way he paints them, at least at first glance. Each image in "Mechanical Gestures" is a jumble of machine parts: Moving Day 5, for instance, looks like the world's worst traffic pileup, with random vehicle parts all over the place. Something about Halligan's style recalls the way a young child paints a picture of the outdoors, with a line along the top to represent the sky. His approach is similar in his seeming refusal to incorporate real-world observations into scenes that claim (mostly through their titles, like Fish and Tyler's Window) to be representations of real objects. Viewed as a whole, however, the works reveal Halligan's very sophisticated eye for conglomerating objects and utilizing vacant space on the page. His fluid compositions move with intuitive coordination and grace, not unlike schools of fish or the flowing, swaying arms of a sea anemone. His colors are also very evocative of sea creatures; mostly pastels, they are beautiful and seductive and occasionally even glittery. He didn't sketch out any of these paintings in advance, yet, unlike conventional watercolors, the small areas of color are incredibly precise and delineated by dark outlines. He achieved this effect by letting each application of paint dry before adding an adjacent color, so that the new paint would seep up to the border and then stop abruptly. Such a meticulous approach confirms these compositions aren't arranged haphazardly at all – the addition of each new part was as carefully and strategically considered as a move in a chess game. Sat., noon-5 p.m., and by appt., 4033A Judah, S.F. (415) 759-4100. (Lindsey Westbrook)