Mark van Yetter at Bridget Donahue

Mark van Yetter’s “The Politics of Attraction” certainly delights and beguiles, however all shouldn’t be because it first seems. The present is primarily composed of two units of works on paper, pastel-Fauvist in palette, marked with a hodgepodge of media resembling pencil, watercolor, oil, and wax crayon. These are accompanied by a lone sculptural set up that includes a ceramic teapot and a pitcher on a pedestal. Such humble, incongruous supplies draw the viewer into a visible world that’s without delay baffling and alluring, like a home of mirrors.

Doubling—in a number of senses—is central to the aesthetic expertise van Yetter presents. In probably the most substantial group of works on paper, all Untitled and from 2022, every composition adheres to an idiosyncratic format of six painted panels organized in two rows of three, one above the opposite, framed by color-pencil outlines. In every case, the outer panels mirror one different typically type and content material, but the 2 central panels appear unrelated. In a single work, a radiant yellow hen seems to be bursting from its cage flanked by lyrical Matissean cats floating in blue indeterminate area. Above them stands a totemic determine in grey with breasts, a penis, and bloated ft turned unnaturally to the suitable like bent logs. What that means is made by way of this juxtaposition of hen, cat, and ogre?

The puzzle is additional sophisticated by the second sequence of work, all nonetheless lives depicting vessels organized in an incongruously demarcated architectural area. Such clunky materiality, accentuated by the inclusion of the particular ceramics, provokes a curious comparability with the lyrical fantasy of the counterpart sequence. What makes this imaginative and prescient cohere?

The cumulative impact of those uncanny tableaux compels the viewer by way of a dreamlike labyrinth of affective affiliation: a sport bereft of ossified logic however brimming with poetic allure.

— Sophia Powers