Ted Halkin has proven himself the least predictable of all the artists who once belonged to the so-called Chicago School of painting.
Several years ago he abandoned the fantasy for which he was best known in favor of a poetic realism that celebrated the pleasures of an urban garden.
Now, in his exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper at the Jan Cicero Gallery, he shows that over the last two years his style has developed into something fresh and personal again.
All the works are abstractions that alternately suggest primitive maps, patterns of rural landscapes viewed from the air and jigsaw puzzles.
As such, they represent nothing, though one or two of the works on canvas achieve the damp and dusky atmosphere of Halkin’s earlier garden paintings.
Other works seem to suggest seasons or times of day in their qualities of light, but again, this has the character of a non-specific fluorescence without ties to even the titles of the paintings.
Halkin’s acrylics on paper, titled with just a date, are dense with interlocking forms that have heavy and sometimes multicolored outlines. They owe something, perhaps, to the later works of Jean Dubuffet.
Halkin’s paintings on canvas, which evoke landscapes in titles such as “Border Fence” and “Eastern Perspective,” present larger, more airy spaces holding an occasional geometric marker, like a way station or milestone.
Some also have another layer of visual incident, as if an enclosed landscape were viewed only in part through a template or screen with cutouts.
Such paintings show a wide range of color, hot to cool, earthen to electric. This is accompanied by an equally wide variety of brushstrokes, small and broken (recalling foliage) to broad and sleekly uninflected (suggesting planes of light).
It’s highly personal work that only now and then gives clues of what preceded it. And anyone coming to it for the first time would not immediately guess it was by Halkin.
Might it turn out to be a fully developed “late style”? Hard to say. But the seeds are there, and the artist is only in his 70s, so there’s still time for more surprises.
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The exhibition continues through April 30 at 221 W. Erie St.
