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Also this issue: Paperback Riders Industry Standard Tabloid Sensation Telling the Truth Twists of Fate Highway to Art Weathering the Storm Art of the Deal |
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May 29-June 4, 2003
art
 Isabel Bigelow, Byobu (Vines and Flowers) (2003), 46 inches by 52 inches, oil on panel diptych. |
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The negative and the positive find a happy medium in Isabel Bigelow’s work.
It helps to remember that nothing is completely abstract: Every shape and color we see has relationships to other shapes, colors and things. Isabel Bigelow, a New York artist who exhibits her work regularly in Philadelphia, makes paintings and monotypes about abstraction and memory that waver ambiguously on the edge of recognizable form. A one-month residency in Tokyo a year or so ago helped her to explore this interest further. The "non-narrative" aspects of Japanese prints and paintings -- in particular the isolated color blocks from a woodcut print that lack defining contour lines -- provided inspiration for her recent work now on display at Pentimenti.
In all of the 19 paintings included in Bigelow's exhibition, silhouettes of vaguely recognizable vegetation can be seen. Bigelow put great effort into the preparation of the ground of these oil-on-panel paintings, building up subtle layers of color and texture. Their textural qualities are richly nuanced, allowing the colors, even in the abstract pieces, to read like fabric, stone and earth -- real materials. One large diptych, Byobu (Leaves), has an icy white background overlaid with a thick lattice of dark green plants with tiny leaves. Bigelow coaxes the two colors to harmonize by rubbing green paint into the scratches in the white ground and creating a soft grainy pattern like a blown-up photograph. Though much smaller, River with Flowers is like a jolt of caffeine. The irregular shapes in intense reddish-orange color are fit together with their opposites -- negative shapes in pearly pink. Together they suggest a landscape with flowers in the foreground -- but just barely. The richness and contrast in the colors tempt the eye to indulge in appreciation of them for their own sake.
Bigelow turns up the intensity again in Blue Landscape. Here precisely shaped patches of saturated cobalt blue are scattered across the picture plane. Nearly abstract, they suggest the negative spaces between thick areas of foliage. It's like the visual effects of an eclipse, where things seem to be the opposite of what they really are. Air takes on substance, matter becomes light and insubstantial. Branches, a 4-foot square painting of overlapping branches with shoots headed in all directions, is one of the most raw and elegant of the paintings. Bigelow paints a thicket of bare and softly angular branches with consistent attention. The black paint changes tone very slightly as she modulates it a little with pinkish tones, while the edges of each branch are precise, with thinner or thicker volumes and contours of great specificity. Bigelow says, "I focus on the spaces between things," and in this painting she brings this focus to bear on each of the dozens of tiny irregular shapes between all of the branches. These negative spaces are like little bits of anti-matter, full of compressed energy.
Along with the paintings, the show includes a portfolio of 10 charming and sophisticated monoprints. Bigelow works on a steel plate with a rough and scratchy texture that comes out in the prints. The influence of Japanese prints is especially evident in the fields of rich and delicate color. Most prints are about the juxtaposition and relationship of forms in two colors on the page, like yin and yang. The colors are soft, neutral and minimal. In one, Bigelow explores the interplay of violet-gray and pale aqua. In another, she uses diagonal shapes in pale, harmonious tones to suggest the slanted shadows of a picket fence on the ground. Shadows of things on the landscape, spaces of open doorways and windows and edges of unknown objects seem to come and go throughout these monotypes. Isabel Bigelow's precision as an artist can be seen in the lightness of the dance -- between positive and negative, abstraction and representation, light and shadow -- resulting in work filled with a piquant ambiguity and a sublime sense of balance.
Isabel Bigelow: Paintings
Through June 14, Pentimenti Gallery, 133 N. Third St., 215-625-9990
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