Cynnie Gaasch is showing "Open Symmetry" at Gallery 164 through July 3. This ink and acrylic work on paper is untitled.

In 1921, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published a graphically based system of psychological analysis still in use today, popularly known as the “inkblot test.” You know, those symmetrical but subjectively ambiguous blobs that are meant to draw out one’s unconscious impulses. Rorschach’s system may be an ingeniously simple diagnostic tool, but it really draws on an age-old childhood pastime: finding shapes—and perhaps meaning—in random, natural objects (clouds, stones, driftwood, etc). This visual/cognitive human tendency persists for many adults; witness the recent claims of religious icons appearing on everything from drywall stains to grilled cheese sandwiches. eBay has been replete with these mundane revelations, which Rorschach might find a curious, populist infusion of his technique.

Encountering Cynnie Gaasch’s work in Open Symmetry, now at Gallery 164, one cannot help but think of Rorschach’s inkblots. Indeed, the technique is similar: Paint or ink is applied to one half of a ground (paper or canvas) which is then folded or applied to an opposite ground in the most basic form of monoprint. In this sense, each of these works has divided in two, a copy generated automatically and symmetrically as a cell divides along its axis of fission. But this, we soon find, is but the first layer and first step of Gaasch’s current work. It’s the open aspect of her symmetrical system of painting that makes this work innovative and successful.

Ever since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism circa 1950, abstract painters have sought a system for their work—a way of completely stepping outside of the subjective realm and into an altered state where there is only pure line, form, color, gesture. Pollock had his “action” painting composed of drips, loops and splashes; Clyfford Still had his scraped, jagged-edged fields of color. And at least one Ab-Ex artist, Morris Louis, tapped into the Rorschachian mode of randomly produced form by applying liquid paint to unprimed canvas; in some Louis paintings, the forms took shape, roughly symmetrically, on either side of a central, reflective void. Gaasch has taken such automatic techniques as a challenge of deconstruction. As she observes in her statement for the exhibition:

…what if the making begins with something that is inherently balanced, a symmetrical form? What if the entire pursuit is to find a way to be free from distraction, able to explore the most beautiful, the most perfect of forms?

The rest of her system, then, is more organic and subject to chance, with each painting drawing on various techniques to subtly distort and customize the underlying symmetrical forms. The result is an uncanny sense of being pulled between perfection and imperfection, a tennis match of visual acuity between the two halves of the painting as we scan for their similarities and differences.

Each of the works in Open Symmetry is inherently two paintings in one—parallel universes of color and form that reveal their distinct characteristics over time. The line of symmetry is more distinct in some works (especially the works on paper, with their inherent variations of edge) than in others, but it always provides the line across which compositional elements are reflected, as well as transformed. In the first untitled painting, for example, a decisive gesture of brownish-black ink traverses the two grounds, anything but symmetrical in its energetic path. Our eyes follow such anomalies because they play out against the background like a jazz soloist riding atop the regular chords and beat of the rhythm section. It is these “solo” elements that make the paintings unique and vibrant; but the same elements, if taken too far, could unbalance or overwork the composition, making them “topple over from their own weight,” as Gaasch puts it. Although some of the paintings flirt with that tipping point, they pull back from it through Gaasch’s practiced sense of balancing even the most maverick marks.

The majority of paintings in the exhibition are untitled and thus avoid any suggestion of subject. Two works, however—Untitled (feminine) and Untitled (masculine)—carry adjectives of gender (if not a title per se). These two paintings are obviously counterparts on some level, but are not hung side by side, mitigating their linkage as obverse compositions. What’s more, Gaasch reverses certain gender-coded elements of abstraction, further challenging the identities she has given in the titles. The “masculine” painting is a composition of rainbow sherbet-like pinks and greens, while “feminine” employs primary colors on a ground that appears raw and unprimed, a la Louis (though it is actually treated with a clear sizing to mitigate absorbency). The forms in “feminine” are suggestive of the female reproductive system, but such a pelvic cross-section is invoked by various other works. Furthermore, “masculine” does not seem to suggest the analogous anatomical forms—the phallic emphasis we might expect. Here, Gaasch may well be attempting to subvert decades of critics’ essentialist readings of abstract expressionist work—the assertion that Frankenthaler’s forms were “softer” than Rothko’s. At every turn, these two works defy the dubious traditions of gendered abstraction, a program of deconstruction surely parallel to Gaasch’s pursuit of “open symmetry” in general.

The several smaller works in the exhibition are departures from the larger, diptych works—connected to the “open symmetry” concept only in that they employ the same underlying monoprint technique. With these paintings, the two counterpart images are completely separated, like identical twins isolated at birth, each to live out her own life and develop different appearances. These individualized twins are often hung near one another, but their forms and colors stand alone, their small nebulae of intense hues vibrating independently, without the need for resonance enjoyed by the “matched” paintings.

All of the works in Open Symmetry tempt us to fall into the Rorschachian game of “what do you see?” Floral or anatomical forms? Knots of Celtic ornament? Organic matter through a kaleidoscope? At the end of the day, we must acknowledge that we bring any such associations with us to the gallery, rather than take them away with us. Gaasch’s work goes well beyond bilateral conversation-starters of Rorschach’s invention. There’s real movement and the elegant tracks of painterly action in these paintings, each the record of a risky game of aesthetic chance, the gamut of unbalancing and rebalancing a composition in every moment. Call it controlled chaos or a creative tightrope act, the power of Gaasch’s new work stems from walking that fine line between the certainties of symmetry and an openness that imparts the rush of possibility.