BRUSHSTROKES ARE ARCHITECTURAL OR EPHEMERAL, respectively, in the work of Joanna Kent and Richard Tinkler. The two artists, showing together in PFA Gallery’s “Vibrations,” both use oil paint to make vivid abstractions. Kent’s sculptural paintings cover cubes or vertical panels with dried plumes of a heathered single hue. Tinkler’s multi-color pictures appear to be blurred, but close inspection reveals the illusion of softness is created by thousands of tightly fitted small gestures.
Kent is a veteran D.C. artist who melds sculpture and painting somewhat in the manner of Anne Truitt, but Kent’s work is as craggy as Truitt’s is sleek. The 11 pieces in this show, made between 1998 and 2002, cover flat surfaces with tufts of pigment, so that the blocky ones resemble carefully pruned shrubs. The wall-mounted vertical panels are bisected by narrow gaps in the paint, a breach that’s most conspicuous in the all-black “Eclipse.” These subtly drawn lines offer the eye a passage into the object, but then the artist’s creations are riddled with small inlets. That Kent’s 3D paintings appear simultaneously solid and airy is their essential mystery.
Where Kent retains something of the fluidity of pigment, Tinkler relies on its liquid qualities. He applies layers of paint while the lower level is still wet, so that different colors partly meld into each other. The resulting images are soft yet organized into overall patterns such as multiple diamonds or rows of lozenges. These paintings, from 2024-25, are fundamentally orderly. Yet they have an oasis-like shimmer that suggests that at any second they could transmute, or even vanish altogether.
