San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, August 28, 2004

Dean Andrews: Light Watch at Takada Gallery
By Kenneth Baker, Art Critic

Dean Andrews' spare paintings at Takada register brushwork very faintly, surrendering most of their expressive energy to incident light. Mixing acrylic with glass microspheres, Andrews makes paintings that respond to every change of vantage point on the viewer's part and every shift in light. In this respect, Andrews' work resembles almost too closely that of Los Angeles painter Mary Corse. But Andrews deploys her medium at what seems like miniature proportions, while Corse's paintings approach mural scale.

Ask to view the show with the gallery lights off: By day, the paintings really come to life under the central skylight. An even sparser installation than we see at Takada would have strengthened the impression Andrews' work makes.

A couple of large canvases ballast the show, but the smallest ones, each less than 6 inches square, find a perfect balance of unprepossessing scale and startling effect, cool objectivity and the power to dramatize unshareable optical sensations. Fragments of grid glow within Andrews' black and pale green monochromatic squares, implying a delicate structure submerged in a brilliant fog.

When a local curator finally organizes the needed show surveying the influence of fog on art made in the Bay Area, Andrews will have a place.