January 25, 2008
Christopher Knight

Drawings capture dangerous energy

Ann Dieneruses pencil, gouache, ballpoint pen and collage to render nonlinear narratives at once exciting and ominous. Birds flit through the underbrush, bees jostle for position with beetles and spiders, and leaves rustle in unseen winds. Force fields are shot through with jagged, swirling vectors.

Diener's 12 recent works at the Bank gallery range from sketchbook pages to mural-size sheets. In the wake of the 1970s revolution of Conceptual art, drawing has assumed near-equivalence with painting, partly because of the immediacy with which it registers thought. Two drawings are executed on buffed-gesso canvas over board, the way a painting might be, and Diener carries off the technique skillfully.

Remarkable juxtapositions abound in Diener’s recent works. Here architectural elements such as greenhouses, wires, fences, arches and hoops weave in and out, sharing the picture plane with sweeping organic forms such as webs, leaves, feathers, seeds and flowers to create intricate and expansive fields, voluminous forms and ponderous negative space. The work intimately pulls the viewer close with precise details yet also requires a distance in order to perceive the whole. This viewing experience mimics the stratified push and pull, macro and micro texture of historical memory that permeates the Central California landscape.

Several dense compositions are organized around voids, yielding a curiously sexual friction. There's something of Lee Bontecou's fusion of organic sensuality and mechanistic threat in these volatile works. Their energy is also reminiscent of Zaha Hadid's architectural renderings and of paintings by Julie Mehretu (who is becoming a generational touchstone). But Diener is fabricating fantastic voyages distinctly her own. The natural world engages in combat with intimations of a built environment, in drawings that temper dark apocalypse with wild exhilaration.