Paint is equally at home with sea urchin or tumbleweed; still, yet, equity offers another 'known', more immediate to the reality of painting: There is the color of the mixed and the churned; a perky viscosity and luminosity--it's changeableness. There is also a dexterity of how it is applied. Paint heaps, smears, and bears resemblance to invented characters or doodles (tiny odd terrestrials) all of which sit within the borders of a frame. The frame, which suggests the limits, is too far off to see, with what lay immediate before it peters off as horizon, as dawn or dusk.

Not unlike a Japanese tearoom the utensils of Hollingsworth's art are placed both to serve and react upon. Despite the abundances of physical paint airiness predominates the best work, each delivering an account of a personality eddying between neatness, decisiveness, and the alter-need for abandonment and risk. In tea ceremony hands move the cup around fecundity. This--the rough and contour of a masters craft--prepares us for the pleasures of refreshment. For Dennis, it seems, refreshment is unquenchable. The desire to touch, move, and build a physical discourse with paint is always in the process of change. Change is suggestive in the absence at the borders. It’s as if to move too tediously up to them would destroy the relation between landform and (non-form) sea.

There are also surface comedies, or characters, to replete his art. Through a recycling of motifs, such so many, you are stricken to wonder if there should have been a more strenuous check on accounts. Except remembering repetition speaks rehearsal, at the same time urgency and need, not to mention, at times, when you are on a good thing to stick to it.

Dennis works big now. After much toss and turn and search within (he wears his heart on his blog, if you've been by) the resultant paintings in this current show prove that a shift in scale can be just what the doctor ordered. You can tell, too, within the array of smaller works on paper, the quick shrift tips its hat back to the intimate. It becomes a complex task rebuilding to meet the new needs to court a vastly larger canvas--either via a combination of flat and massive floating islands or the building of continents, seas and oceans--God's or nature's work converging on a canvas built from different precisions, alignments, and glue.

There's a lift in Dennis Hollingsworth's latest fandango. It hints, indeed shoots, to a meteorite-stung oasis in the sky.

Dennis Hollingsworth's current show is at Buchmann Galerie , and runs March 11- April 16, 2005.