26 Feb 2019

Jim Edwards and Julian Jackson

490 Atlantic

Reviewed by Elizabeth Johnson

Jim Edwards and Julian Jackson revisit the mid-1960s modern aesthetic, tenderly exploiting Greenbergian formalism, flatness, and purity. In this moment before social conformity turned to radicalism, radios, TVs, and stereos transmitted analog signals from behind smooth, molded metal, plastic, and glass. Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Gemini space modules surpassed their Russian counterparts, and the country had seemingly recovered from the death of John Kennedy. A similar eye-of-the-storm mood at 490 Atlantic recalls Ken Noland, Frank Stella, and Al Held as they aim high but not deep for clarity wrought from relating pure hue and gently curving edges.

Resisting postmodernism, the work feels innocent but never tenuous. Dividing the internal from external, Edwards's traced paths race forward like electric circuits, justifying each emblematic shape at discrete, filigreed moments. Jackson's incomplete, nested circles throb and echo with either a hero's expulsion or return.