It’s exciting to see an artist come into her vocabulary the way Holly Coulis has in “Eyes and Yous,” her fourth solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Since her New York debut, nearly 20 years ago, she has covered a lot of subjects, from Napoleon to the common house cat, and has developed a recognizable style of flat but brightly hued shapes — most recently oranges and lemons — bordered with contrasting colors. It’s a clever and often very appealing way to enjoy the pleasures of abstract painting and even graphic design without the burdensome self-seriousness that afflicts them both.
But now the oranges and lemons have gotten bigger. Sometimes they overlap, creating Brice Marsden-like patterns within which Coulis can juxtapose lucid blocks of orange, pink and green, and sometimes she crops them until they’re unrecognizable as fruit. Most crucially, she’s also begun painting their outlines with a dry brush that skips and streaks. It’s a small change with an outsize effect: By enriching their visual texture, revealing their multiple layers and capturing the sensuous motion of the painter’s hand, these streaky outlines make plain just how substantial the paintings are. In “Mist Eyes,” four red-bordered lemons are superimposed in a kaleidoscopic double Venn diagram; in “Day You,” the figurative pretext is like an anchor keeping Coulis’s delirious colors tethered to earth.
