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ART PICK OF THE WEEK                                   LA WEEKLY March 8, 2002

Robert Kingston has moved his studio back to Southern California bringing a painterly rigor from back East. Interestingly; the geometry that now determines Kingston’s compositions — sometimes grltty, sometimes piss-elegant — suggests European (post-Bauhaus) and Californian (abstract-classicist) more than East Coast models. The New York practice that most manifests In his latest canvases is the dialectically schizy constructivist gestural push-and-pull painting taught by Hans Hoffmann to generations of restive abstract expressionists and which has recurred In post-minimalist abstraction. I guess this makes Kingston a post-post-minimalist (he’s too intricate, even playful, a geometer to be a neo-minimalist). It certainly makes him an Intelligent painter, studying and embracing the history of abstraction without simply spewing it back at us or trying to strategize a position for himself within It. Kingston doesn’t need to paint so much as that he needs for paintings like these to exist, so he makes them.

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