Review: Robin Mitchell's 'Moment to Moment' holds the attention Robin Mitchell's small paintings on paper at Craig Krull Gallery are more fascinating than they should be. On first glance, they look good, their star-bursts of supersaturated color grabbing the eye, which bounces, like a pinball, around several centers of concentrated energy. The eye's up-and-down, back-and-forth, here-and-there movements run up against the impulse to blink or at least squint - in part because of the intense tints Mitchell has used and in part because of her compositions, which resemble whacked mandalas. To linger over any one of Mitchell's 28 abstractions is to see the simplicity, even crudeness, of every brush stroke, as well as the ordinariness of its hand-painted patterns, whose homemade imperfections are neither hidden nor made a big deal of. No gimmicks or secrets are to be found in Mitchell's art, whose pedestrian integrity - or blunt dumbness - is bound to bother viewers who want art to be all about bravura brushwork or its intellectual substitute: conceptual difficulty. And that's where the magic happens. The clunky elements that Mitchell marshals in her humble paintings each add up to a whole far greater than the sum of their parts. Defying logic, these vibrant paintings hold one's attention longer, and with greater focus, than you'd expect - or believe.