March 12 to April 18, 2015
210 Tenth Avenue, 6th Floor (between 24th and 25th streets)
New York City, 212 691 6565

In her resplendent second solo show with Edward Thorp, of paintings made in the last two years, Judith Simonian demonstrates a genius for color, texture, and the exploration of spatial conundrums. Twenty canvases, worked in acrylic, range in size from a mere eight by ten inches to as much as six foot by five with subject matter that cycles between categories of comparable breadth. There are what I’d describe as optical-illusion still lifes, domestic interiors, travel theme — on earth and in space, and nature studies. It’s a roomy, mixed bag of themes.

In Snow Cone (2014), a good-sized work at 46 x 64 inches, figure-ground elements add up to the representational suggestion of a cake wedge — an illusion enhanced by a bright triangle of frosting at image center, behind which a brightly hued, roughly textured yellow background seems to throw the cake’s decorated layers, and the lower third of the painting, into shadow. The pedestal of a cake stand can also be discerned, where its elliptical silver platter appears to hover over a tabletop. This metaphor of the cake wedge simultaneously alludes to “slicing” and “layers,” terms familiar to most anyone who works with imagery in the online environment. In the physical studio, Simonian often employs collage, in techniques where “slicing” and “layers” are quite literal.

Collage can be seen to contribute to the optical illusions of Fruit on Blue Table (2013). Both paintings, along with others such as In the Rapids and Red Fish Bowl, while accomplished works in themselves, come across as studies where the artist hones her craft for more ambitious undertakings, such, for instance, as Patio Lounge Chairs (2014), a gorgeous tour-de-force of abstraction and illusion. A deep pool where goldfish swim dominates the foreground, while the eponymous chairs, in brilliant vermillion, there are almost hidden behind a black umbrella, which decently shields from view a couple enjoying the tropical ambience of a summer afternoon. The evocation of plant life, a humid atmosphere, and a cooling body of water all induce the viewer to read much more into the painter’s marks than might actually be there.

“Fleshy Pink Room” (2014) is a six-foot-high painting whose lighting effects, layering, and pink and green tones bring to my mind the mannerist master Jacopo Pontormo. A forbidding foreground barrier keeps us from walking straight in; instead, we must find a way to float over a lime green tongue in its groove on our way to the room’s pink flesh, as it basks in the glow of a far blue entryway. This painting exemplifies Simonian’s well-justified reputation as an intuitive painter. To quote from the press release, the artist enjoys turning “colorful scraps of trash” into pictorial compositions that approach “near collapse.” In fact, the bombardment of sensory data that we continuously take in from the world would collapse us without the mind’s capacity to knit it together. Simonian’s paintings suggest the contradictory resilience and fallibility of this process. In so doing, they knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition, along with the senses.

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Janet Kurnatowski Gallery
205 Norman Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11222
(718) 383-9380

November 18th – December 17, 2005

Judy Simonian, a painter based in New York, blended themes of architecture and confinement in a recent solo exhibition at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery. Entitled “Chronic Civilization,” her show of three large paintings and several watercolors encompassed such disparate interiors as a medieval dungeon cell, the cavernous interior of a nightclub, urban office spaces, and the bowed perspective of an arena.

Simonian’s intuitive working methods bring a spirited, romantic negligence to her paintings. On canvas, her process is one of accretion: surfaces are often built up with collaged paper. Almost nothing of the canvas itself remains. In “Deep Purple Space,” painterly pleasure in light and shadow create a claustrophobic ambiance. The imagery clambers over and under a dense brew of gestural painting, hand-cut stencils, and sneaker tread textures. Within the tubular perspective of “Pink Cell,” schematic marks for granite blocks are accented by splashes of red paint while a shaft of sunlight illuminates the chamber. It’s a boudoir fit for a heroine of the French Revolution. Gazing into “Pink Cell,” I suddenly realized that I was the absent but implied figure. I was standing in the heroine’s soiled silk mules.

Simonian’s loose wet on wet technique weds the unreliable authority of power to the unpredictable process of watercolor in her works on paper. Several of them suggested architectural interiors where strong light seeps in through bars and barriers. The  paint’s liquidity creates an atmospheric background over which hard-edged forms appear. The barn-like environment of “6AM” featured horizontal burnt sienna strokes laid atop a reddish foreground, and recalled photographs of Jackson Pollock’s Long Island studio. In “Winter Garden,” arched indigo struts cage an upward, prisoner’s-eye view of the sky. The distemper of office environments was evoked in the wavering, single point perspective of a work entitled “Corporate Light.”

Simonian is very much an artist interested in the social role of art; she has created public art projects in New York during her long career. Yet, a sense of the almost sacred solitude of the artist at work pervades this suite of paintings. Artists from Fra Angelico to the French filmmaker Robert Bresson have grappled with the boundaries of the studio, the picture plane, the cinematic frame – their limits versus freedoms. Chronic Civilization alluded to such meditative thoughts, but also brought up a range of topical subjects such as surveillance and police power. In doing so, Simonian deftly balanced beauty against the citizen’s vulnerability – and the will to preserve freedom.

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