Art criticism is sort of like writing a stylistic instruction manual for art. A critic, like a coroner, cuts into an artist's work and, with morbid zeal, exposes its guts to the public. Then of course, people copy the artist's style, and the whole thing becomes cliché. Aristotle, for instance, cracked the code of tragedy, thereby destroying it as an art form, relegating it to the status of cheap sentiment. To keep ahead of the critics, new artists create new styles and methods—new memes, new forms—that are themselves, in due course, dissected, packaged and eventually sold.

It's easy to suppose, perhaps, that criticism survives on some kind of symbiosis with art—like the bacteria that help us digest food. Easy to suppose that art requires our analysis of it, just as god requires our worship. With no impetus to innovate, artistic form will stagnate. Criticism destroys art, but destruction fosters innovation—like a forest fire nurturing fresh vegetation, creating a new environment, trying out different genetic lines. This is the system.

But sometimes artists fight back. Kevin Fey's collection leaves no exposed flesh for the critic to cut into. The work bears its process on its face; in a way it's all process. There's no need for an instruction manual. Kevin Fey's work is not only not representational—i.e. abstract—but it's not even a work at all. Not an expression of anything. Instead, it's an act of nature. It's an organic life form. Or a rock formation. It just is.

Kevin Fey's work invites us to be geologists for a while. Paints drip. Solvents dissolve, corrode—erode, even. We're not looking for seams and rivets. We're looking for geodes and mineral deposits. The works are earthy—like an old log that someone has decided to use for an end table. Or perhaps better, like the glass created by meteors crashing into the surface of the moon and melting the soil. Haunting, exotic, and completely determined by the simple scientific laws of the universe.

But we are only human. For whatever reason, we've got this core-level drive to understand—this longing not only to figure out what something represents or what it does, but for there to be a Creator behind it somewhere that pumped it full of intention and purpose and beauty. A painting is not just paint.

So Kevin Fey's work turns us into religious fanatics too. There's no way the eye could have just evolved, right? The atmosphere: lucky chance? That drip of solvent: totally random? There must be something deeper going on. And now we're back to being critics. Not so much coroners, anymore, as priests, shamans, looking for omens in the entrails. Looking for some sign from the Creator, some order in the cosmos.

But maybe all along we were not decoding, not destroying the art. Maybe the art is decoding us—reflecting hidden little corners of our psyche. Maybe, after all, art criticism is more about the critic than the artist--which explains why criticism, like translation, is perishable while art is not.

So, turns out it's our own guts we've just been poking around at, looking for clues. And it is, finally, this narcissism, this drive to see yourself in everything, that Kevin Fey's work exposes, mocks, celebrates.

-Brian Hutler, Los Angeles, August 2009