Hull's artwork becoming more refined -- as well as more raw

Mar. 10--Richard Hull's works on paper at the Carrie Secrist Gallery are mostly recent, but some date from the 1980s and '90s, as if to illustrate how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Many of the artist's new crayon drawings have central, animated, gearlike forms very different from his long-familiar imaginary environments that resemble stage sets. But their compartments, symbols, scratchings and color also have been characteristic of the artist for decades--and those whom it once arrested will not fail to take pleasure from it now.

Older prints on view indicate stages in the process of refining Hull's personal language, and the black-and-white essays are refined indeed. What has been gained since then is a renewed quality of rawness, common to the best outsider art collected by insiders of the Chicago art world.

Hull's trundling personages convey both manic energy and impenetrable mystery. So they're raucous and mute at once. This comes across with considerable power, again breathing life into the cliche of Chicago's preferred fantasy art being equally withdrawn and brawny.

This year Hull is 51, and for about half that time he has benefited from support within the art community. Such support can continue even as the art diminishes through the comfort of repetition. Now, however, it looks as if Hull's work again is earning its reputation.

At 835 W. Washington St., 312-491-0917.

Noelle Allen's drawings at the Wendy Cooper Gallery are all of graphite on large Mylar sheets and prove to be deceptively delicate. From a distance, they might suggest splashes of liquid or magnified colloidal suspensions. But up close it is a different story.

Allen is most interested in conveying the copulation, cannibalism, mutation and decay of primitive life forms. But she reveals this only slowly and in part, through creations that are largely abstract and predominantly lyrical. One form might have scales, another eyes, and the way they are disposed on the sheet might suggest tearing muscle tissue or viscera.

Allen's networks of fine lines are at the service, then, of horror. Somewhere behind them are Surrealist nightmares and the perversity of Hans Bellmer crossed with anatomical drawings by Vesalius. All of it is very subdued, as much because of the absence of color as the apparent weightlessness of Allen's mark-making.

Shown concurrently are found objects such as driftwood, treated with resin and deployed as floor sculptures. These creeping, spiny things suggest the same state of nature as the drawings, but by comparison assert themselves bluntly and seem too much an artist's invention. They presumably aspire to the dark unconscious forms of Surrealist objects, though Allen would seem to gain access to that realm through drawing, not through working in three dimensions.

At 119 N. Peoria St., 312-455-1195.

Whenever new technology becomes available to art-making processes, a number of artists will use it to perform tasks formerly done by hand. William Betts' paintings at the Peter Miller Gallery provide a vivid example of the practice.

The artist shot digital photographs--generally landscapes--in several European countries. Then on his computer he worked his way across each photograph horizontally, extracting a slice of its color to the height of a single pixel. This thin strip of variegated color he then extended vertically, using a machine that he programmed to paint stripes.

The stripes precisely represent the colors in the photographs, though of course the landscapes have been abstracted. No trace of the artist's hand appears in any of the pictures. The only "personality" evident from the way the paint was set down is that of the machine, which produced uniform, slightly raised striations.

The paintings are as crisply decorative as can be. But Betts' process is more important than the objects it produced--and you would not know the process if you were not told. But everybody involved with contemporary art is used to that, and it also is generally accepted that things written or said by artists can contradict the physical objects they create. Betts' paintings fit into this world most beautifully.

At 118 N. Peoria St., 312-951-1700.

Works that seem slight in isolation sometimes take on weight when seen in relation to the rest of the artist's output. This is certainly the case with "Making Boys and Girls," the project by Jeanne Dunning at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

The artist had come across a 2004 scientific study in which preschool children were asked to create male and female dolls with detachable parts including genitalia. Several children created dolls in which the sexual parts were mixed up, combined or relocated, and this interested Dunning, whose work long has centered around issues of gender and the human body.

The study did not have photographs, so Dunning duplicated it with girls and boys, whose creations she shot in color along with the kids and their parents. A video also shows her working with the children, and an interactive program allows viewers to choose whom they will see.

Dunning provides, then, illustrations. And after initial surprise at where and how the dolls represented what, viewer interest diminishes, in large part because the children's responses and Dunning's photographs have a numbing similarity. But another factor has to do with their nature as illustrations: being shown how the kids confused body parts turns out to be not much different from being told, and once that registers, there is not enough art to hold attention unless one relates the piece to the years of Dunning's work that will be shown in a retrospective later this season.

At 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, 847-491-4000.

Richard Hull at the Carrie Secrist Gallery through March 18.

Noelle Allen at the Wendy Cooper Gallery through March 11.

William Betts at the Peter Miller Gallery through March 11.

Jeanne Dunning at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art through March 12.

aartner@tribune.com

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