The funny thing about the smoke in Dennis Lee Mitchell's drawings is that it doesn’t seem hot. Instead, the sooty tones and marks are rather cool and calming. The undulating saturation of the gestures resembles the flow of water, the matter gathering at or dissipating from the fine edge of his forms, like the dried-up borders of a stain. In this light, his many radial compositions can feel like so many tiny waves rippling from a disturbance at the center. It seems almost absurd for a medium such as smoke to suggest the character of water, the two ideas so ensconced in our consciousnesses as inherently opposite. But, it's the completely novel character of Mitchell's drawings that allow for such varied interpretation of the viewing experience. This is a process that is relatively unusual, so unique to the artist that a viewer has very little to draw upon to place it within our typical understanding of works on paper.
Yet, there is an urge in a viewer to name or categorize Mitchell's forms. While the artist is able to anticipate how the gestures he makes with his torch might settle upon the papers’ fibers, the drawings are intuitive and abstract. It's our own pareidolia that strives for recognition, that locates imagery within pattern, like the derivation of meaning from an ink blot test. Mitchell is not drawing pictures of anything in particular, rather he's making space for the inherent properties of the medium to do what they do. In works like his “Portugal Series,” an astounding degree of illusionistic space is created through Mitchell's layering of smoke, the ebbs and flows of the soot resembling the highlights and shadows that light casts upon a form.
Insomuch as Mitchell's works capture the remarkable aesthetic potential of smoke, so too are these drawings a testament to the poetry of its science. The drawings’ radial compositions are not truly symmetrical, but oftentimes seem close to it. And, Mitchell's affinity for this shape results in multiples, the repetition reinforcing the subtle differences among the pieces. The ghostly halos in the first of his “Nebula Series” are that much more fragile compared to the finite edges of the second, while the both of them are so airy and ephemeral in the presence of No. 4 --a spotlight in the darkness in comparison. Like snowflakes or fingerprints, these differences underscore the impossibility of true sameness in the natural world.
The significance of Mitchell's smoke drawings also derives from their indexical nature, in the physical presence of the matter that makes up the works’ meaning: the transformative power of fire. In several of Mitchell's newest works, the introduction of a wider range of color reinforces the phenomenal. Applying heating additives to the flame of his torch, the artist harnesses these chemical reactions into billowing, all-over abstractions. There's a kind of logical magic to these, with a heightened awareness of the process. Between the combustion of the fuel and the additives, and the finished product, lies that at which Mitchell bids us to wonder: that fleeting moment wherein soot is airborne, a sublime state rendered through an extraordinary footprint on paper.
Robin Dluzen
Artist & Art Critic
2024