Printed to the max

Throwing money at the problem is a classic recipe for disappointment. With expectations high, results are almost sure to fall short.

Except in the case of this year's Jerome Foundation print fellowships, which produced a splendid exhibit, on view through June 26. The $15,000 Jerome grant went to Highpoint Center for Printmaking, an internationally known Minneapolis professional studio, where the chosen artists -- Katinka Galanos, Miles Mendenhall and Justin Terlecki -- were able to work for nine months.

To non-initiates, printmaking is among the fussiest and most mystifying of art forms there are, involving drawing on rocks (lithography), metal plates (etching) or mesh fabric (screen printing). After the images are fixed, artists and technicians set to work using ink, squeegees and heavy equipment to transfer the images to paper. Often they have to run each sheet through the press a dozen or more times, adding a new color with each pass. The effort can take weeks and may result in only a few images. At a studio such as Highpoint, 10 or 15 prints would be a good-sized edition. Such prints are closer to paintings and other unique images than they are to, for example, posters, which can be run off in almost unlimited numbers.

A whiter shade of pale

Galanos' six white-on-white screenprints are extreme examples of the art form. Displayed unframed on specially built white tables at the gallery's entrance, they are a housekeeper's nightmare but, oh, so gorgeous. Every dust mote clouds them and they are, obviously, impossible to reproduce in a newspaper, where a white, postcard-sized rectangle on a 3-feet-tall white page would just look like a blooper. See them in morning light, however, and their ethereal presences hum with quiet beauty.

Into each sheet of thick creamy paper, Galanos has impressed a lemony white rectangle. Seen from the window side, the papers appear to be buff-colored on white tables. But the tones shift if you move into the gallery. Depending on the angle of light and time of day, the rectangles may seem to hover above the paper rather than sinking into it. Or the white ink will acquire an opalescent gleam and reveal soft stripes and even single lines of tiny white-on-white words.

The words are dedications, presumably to friends of the artist: "For Bruno Nuytten" or "For You, M." Maybe it helps to be a myope, afflicted with that extreme form of nearsightedness that reveals a forest of information in every fiber of a printed page. Or maybe Galanos' prints are such a pleasure simply because they transform the act of seeing into a meditative reverie.

Strictly black and white

Mendenhall, who made his national debut Wednesday as a contestant on Bravo's new reality show "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist," was also mesmerized by light, but that glow emanated from a computer screen. His square black-and-white screenprints, each more than 2 feet tall and wide, replicate the patterns of pixels progressively enlarged until they dissolve into blurs.

The first in the series is primarily black with white dots and dashes smaller than a pencil eraser. Others are plaid and checkerboard designs composed of bars, grids, zigzags and other geometric shapes. The final image, "Two Things at Once and Then Nothing at All," of white spots emerging from gray haze, suggests lights materializing on a fog-shrouded highway. Again, the precision of the imagery is remarkable. Composed of lines finer than baby hair, the images are soft-focus but never smeared or blurry. Like Galanos' meditations on light, Mendenhall's designs are exercises in perfection that push screen printing to its technical limits.

Vacation reports

Terlecki's vignettes, inspired by travels in India and Spain, are a terrific counterpoint to the intellectual abstractions of his colleagues. Sharply observed, expertly executed, personal and sometimes comic, they offer an engaging armchair tour of exotic locales. Based on sketches from his travel notebooks, the images look a bit like scenes from graphic novels. There's an implied narrative, but no plot.

Arriving at "Mumbai Airport," our backpacking hero -- presumably Terlecki himself -- stares agape at a vast swirl of people densely packed beneath a canopy with a night sky and distant city behind. On a houseboat in weedy waters, he shares a pen with the boatman while a fellow passenger lolls under a ruffled canopy and palm fronds flutter across the bay. During a power blackout in Varkala, he slumbers in steamy darkness below an image of the Hindu elephant god Ganesh. Later in Spain he snaps photos of the Alhambra, studies the crowd gaping at Picasso's "Guernica" mural, and watches a festival in Seville where a statue of the enthroned Virgin Mary floats past on a litter borne by at least six guys whose white shoes peep from beneath her parade skirts. Terlecki's keen eye, deft hand and attention to droll details enliven every image.

Kudos also to expert printer Joanne Price, who oversees the fellowship program at Highpoint, and to the jurors who picked the artists from dozens of applicants: Minneapolis gallery owner Todd Bockley and artist Carolyn Swiszcz.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431