New ways to shape his creative world

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Most visitors to the Marsha Mateyka Gallery's Sam Gilliam "New Work" exhibit will remember the artist's intensely emotional 2005 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in which he juxtaposed poured brilliant color with rectilinear geometric shapes.

Many thought Mr. Gilliam wouldn't be able to come up with more artistic inventions, but he has here. It's a remarkable grouping of five acrylic paintings on birch wood and five paper constructions of silk screen, cement and stitchery in which he demonstrates new ways of making art.

Interviewed at the gallery, Mr. Gilliam explains that the plywood is constructed like a thick sandwich, with the uppermost layer of birch painted.

"The panels tell me how to paint and how to connect the sections," he says. "I think of them as random geometry."

Like most of the works -- as seen in the first two paintings, named "Smooth" and "Like Black Pepper" -- he first cuts up commercially sized 4-by-8-foot veneered birch on which he paints circles. He then cuts them into various sizes -- most often rectangles -- and reconfigures them.

It's a rich, complex constructing of a unique art.

Mr. Gilliam placed "Smooth" at the exhibit's opening, then contrasts both its transparent and even surfaces with "Like Black Pepper."

Looking closely at "Smooth," visitors see that Mr. Gilliam effectively combines a heavy opaque ground with the more transparent birch wood. Only a whitish ovallike shape interrupts the downward flow of the birch patternings.

Moreover, he thickly painted the right panel, with a brilliant cobalt blue half oval decorating the "inset," or rectangular piece, attached to the bottom. It's from one of the first cutups.

Mounted directly across is "Like Black Pepper," a more complexly conceived work. Fluid blue, yellow and red ovals flow from left to right through the disparately sized panels, with the "inset" mounted at top left. It's a real beauty.