Here Today

by Robin Rice

The abstract paintings of Diane Pieri and Doris Staffel may not look a bit alike, but they are compatible and companionable in adjacent spaces at Rosenfeld Gallery.

Staffel’s series “New Work on Paper” consists of small, squarish paintings, 8 or 9 inches to a side. Intimate in scale, their boldness reaches across the room with swelling and contracting shapes of black, white, chalky blue, emerald and lipstick red. The artist, 89, continues to practice painting as a vital engagement with contrasting expressive elements. Her personal interpretation of the lessons of Modernist teachers like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko merges seamlessly into her practice of Tibetan Buddhism and its search for the resolution of polarities. It isn’t a quiet conversation — brash, stylish, self-consciously casual, it feels more like the painted equivalent of cocktail-party repartee in which witty ripostes mask something more piercing and profound.

Ethereal and luxurious, Pieri’s “Waterfall Journeys” beckons viewers into pale, segmented spaces. Lines and markings are thin, flexible and deft as an Indian miniature. There are allusions to gardens, architecture and textiles; to traditional patterns, both those made by people and which appear in nature. Confetti-like scatterings of circular elements are as ephemeral as bubbles in a stream. Contrasting large flowers and leaves have an endearing awkwardness. Pieri continues to use areas of gold leaf as another color. Adding a second precious metal for the first time, she integrates delicate drawings in silverpoint. In this technique, used by da Vinci and Rembrandt, a silver stylus is drawn like a pencil across a coarse ground. Initially pale and shiny, the tracks of silver soon begin to tarnish and darken. In a counterpoint to painting’s characteristic illusion of capturing onrushing moments of time, silverpoint consciously surrenders. It acknowledges that we are embedded in time. What we see today is not what we will see tomorrow.