Adventures in 2D

Robin Rice on Visual Art

by Robin Rice

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Published: Feb 5, 2008

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even in Philadelphia's rich gallery environment, you'd be hard pressed to find two more visually satisfying shows than those of Emily Brown at Gallery Joe and Christine Lafuente at Gross McCleaf. It would also be hard to find two 2D landscape shows that look more different. Of course Brown and Lafuente have one or two important things in common; otherwise, why compare them? Both artists distill what they see into representations that are economical and personally coded in terms of execution. Their processes are reductive almost to the point of minimalism without surrendering meaningful information. The best of these works hold abstraction and representation in an almost magical tension.

Oddly, images of Emily Brown's works on paper (as above) do not do them justice, making them seem somehow obvious and heavy-handed, where they are delicate and protean in real life. With the exception of Winter Maple, a large snowy tree scene, everything in the current show represents water in a natural setting without reference to land, plants or identifiable reflections. The surface is slightly agitated with shadowed and highlighted ripples and wavelets, but this activity is muted without the urgency of strong directional currents, expanding impact rings or splashes. Light dances on the fluid skin, sometimes oblitering small textures with big open patches of gleaming unmarked paper.

It's a calligraphic field effect, reasonably comparable to Jackson Pollock or, more obviously, to Monet's late waterlillies. Like Monet, Brown arrives at abstraction by being very attentive to what is seen. Where Monet represented subtle phenomena using Impressionist-derived dabs of color, in her graphite works Brown employs conventionalized mark-making. The strategy suggests someone like Chuck Close who uses squiggles of contrasting colors to build another color or value. Brown incorporates undulating lines, squashed spirals and small vertical dashes or dots. Such contrasting semi-decorative patterns sometimes cross one another. They resolve from a distance to suggest moiré effects often observable in real life as the water surface interfaces with reflections from above and shadows from below.

Brown's monochromatic work is executed in elusive gray on white, colors that could be seen as intrinsic to the water she represents. Mediums include ink wash and graphite, pale and reflective as silverpoint.

Using a different medium — fluid, almost slurpy, oil paint — and a different approach to representation but an equally rigorous eye, Christine Lafuente also shows us the essence of visable surfaces. In her present work, Lafuente moves out of her better-known still-life vein to paint plein-air, sometimes rural settings. In two almost aerial images of Fox Hill, made at different seasons and times of day, the skin of the earth — geologic and molded by humans — can be seen as an interface between earth and sky, to which an atmospheric haze clings, all bathed in transitory light from above.

It could be said that Lafuente reveals a macrocosm where Brown finds a microcosm, but aren't these the same in the end? Lafuente, like Brown, radically abstracts her subject without surrendering the almost sublime specificity of the visual moment.

One painter whom she might recognize as a forebear is Manet. Like him, Lafuente condenses the scene with all of its complex shades and colors to simple, seemingly offhand brush strokes. Each is laid in with dashing Zen-like fluidity and improvisation, often with a brush loaded with more than one color. The detailed passages of her paintings are as visually satisfying as the wholes.

Anyone who has studied representational drawing or painting knows the challenge of pulling the minutiae of specificity into a solid undeniable totality, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts — without slighting these parts. Both Brown and Lafuente do this by deliberately imposing limitations on their means of representation. They choose different limitations, but both artists set "rules" for themselves, processes that enable them and us to see beyond the superficial to a dynamic, underlying flow of energies.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Emily Brown: Surfaces and Reflections

Through Feb. 23, Gallery Joe, 302 Arch St., 215-592-7752, galleryjoe.com.

Christine Lafuente: Windows and Distances

Through Feb. 20, Gross McCleaf Gallery, 127 S. 16th St., 215-665-8138, grossmccleaf.com.

 

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