As DeCordova curator Nick Capasso announces in an introductory wall text, ‘‘Big Bang! puts forth abstract paintings that address the structures of the universe, the mind, and the technologies that link them — art for the Information Age!’’ A museum wall label explains that Walker’s paintings were inspired by research into cosmology, neurology, computer science, meteorology, geology, and other fields. Similarly exotic preoccupations animate many other paintings in the show.
Making art appear more meaningful and relevant by relating it to some other field of study is a strategy that’s become all too common among artists and curators of the postmodern era. But what Capasso’s exciting title and rhetoric can’t disguise is that the kind of neatly crafted, mildly idiosyncratic, optically catchy, all-over pattern painting his exhibition mostly presents is not the rebirth of abstract art he claims it to be, but a familiar, commercially and academically well-established style. Though absorbing to behold, Walker’s paintings, too, are undermined by a suave designer sensibility. They might make excellent illustrations in a popular science magazine.
Too many of the artists included rely on some routinized additive process. Julie Miller draws zillions of tiny, colored circles on paper; Jon Petro paints countless tight coils on large and extra-large canvases; Reese Inman covers surfaces with exactingly gridded, slightly raised dots. Biology, particle physics, and cybernetics may be evoked, but seeing a lot of this kind of atomized work gets pretty monotonous.
