When, earlier this fall, I had the chance to examine an extensive group of recent paintings in Lois Dickson’s Columbia County studio something that became very clear was the particular nature of development in her work, whether within a given canvas or from picture to picture or across this segment of her mature oeuvre. Ludic improvisation is the dominant vibe, and yet the progress within and between canvases suggests its own logic. What struck me quite forcibly was the modernity of Dickson’s progress—modernity, that is, as opposed to postmodernity. OK, there’s a leading role for the Pixar/Disney fish character Nemo in her almost George Condo-like painting of that title from 2016, and a jocular sense of Mike Kelley run amok within the pictorial space of Las Meninas in Procession (2015). But the accumulating jumble of Dickson’s imagery is irony free. She lets forms and feelings dictate a scene, but there is always clarity and rigor in the direction.

Lois Dickson, Nemo, 2016. Oil on linen, 64-x-64 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and John Davis Gallery

John Davis Gallery, until October 9, 2016. 362-1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534, (518) 828-5907
Painting Center, from October 6, 2016. 547 W 27th St #500, New York, NY 10001,

 (212) 343-1060

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Mary Ijichi, Dan Mills, and Jeffrey Reed at George Billis Gallery
October 28 – November 22, 2014
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 645 2621

Functioning as pressure valves for excessively solicited curators and dealers, cluster exhibitions — mini-one person shows that offer a third alternative to the expansive solo show and the thematic group show — give artists the benefit of a solo listing, and the sponsoring gallery an efficient scheduling solution. Of the venues I visited one evening this month, the Painting Center managed to squeeze together solo shows by Elisa Jensen, Lois Dickson and Ying Li in their modest space, while the George Billis Gallery offered its own trio of solos with Jeffrey Reed, Mary Ijichi and Dan Mills. Billis’s recently expanded gallery is a welcome improvement for a venue dedicated to providing exposure to a large stable of artists. Lois Dickson’s choice of Elisa Jensen and Ying Li to share the space with her this month is an expression of solidarity among the membership of this long-standing artist-run institution. I wished they all had more space to share.

Elisa Jensen’s work was surprisingly large, having previewed the images online and assumed a scale that would have matched what I know of the space itself. They are urban scenes with a flat, linear quality reminiscent of Ben Shahn. The wall graffiti in Yellow Skirt, Brooklyn (all works 2014, except where noted) shares the same slender calligraphy as the bicycles depicted in several other pictures. By a crude delineating technique, Jensen suspends her imagery between a gritty realism and a self-conscious primitivism that in tandem captures both the solidity and the transient temporality of a cluttered Brooklyn sidewalk.

On the other side of a half wall, Lois Dickson’s abstractions evoked a melding of space and figure one might associate with better examples of allegorical symbolism. Her ability to match a remarkable inventiveness with subtle paint handling is particularly evident in Backstage, a canvas that, frankly, deserved the sort of space Larry Gagosian recently squandered in his uptown digs on the sophomoric maneuvers of Richard Prince. It is a canvas of rare erudition and presence. It alone is worth the trip to this fifth floor roost, high above the gallery district’s hinterlands.

Ying Li, occupying the small chamber (the euphemistically familiar “project” room) to the side of Dickson’s allotment, succeeded in reproducing the charged feeling of a working studio with selections from an extended study of views framed by the square lights of a large, grid-like window. The window is that of a space Li moved into after her husband’s untimely passing. The poignancy of her sharing her partner’s perspective on the city through the same transom is kept silently personal, leaving the viewer with a characteristic maelstrom of multiple views, painted in Li’s fierce, brawling color and seismic texture. And yet the Monet blue of City Series #3: Blue Curtain hints with both delicacy and abandon at the solitude of a podium on an empty stage.

Attuned, I suppose to the square frame of Li’s work, I was drawn immediately, at Billis, to Jeffery Reed’s landscapes. On panels measuring little more than nine by nine inches, Reed proves himself a match to the elusive ambition of his forebears: the depiction of air and light. Refined in the studio from outdoor studies made in Maine, Pennsylvania and Ireland, Reed combines memory and visual notes to produce jewels of form and color, informed by late afternoon cloud patterns, sunlit structures and receding planes — well, let’s face it, the most conventional aspects of landscape painting one could imagine. And yet there is not a hint of pedantic posturing or histrionic calls to tradition. Soft Rain, measuring a mere six by ten inches, is an affirming tour de force of nature seen through a sensibility.

Reed’s sturdy reserve proved that he, too, could endure the compression of an undersized-solo-show confederacy. But there was still more to see. A mere head turn and I was presented with Mary Ijichi’s drawings and collages, again of modest scale hovering around sixteen inches, which blend string tape with acrylic paint on Mylar. Quietly contemplative, they mimic the delicacy of Paul Klee but with a different sense of playfulness. Here the focus is on the phenomenology of patterns. The text-oriented pieces place her closer (though not necessarily indebted) to Agnes Martin. They reiterate the accidental texture of a Roman Opalka, yet steer clear of his obsessive density.

Ijichi’selegance compels the observer to locate herself at an optimal viewing distance, which turns out to be rather close and fortunately harmonious with the installation. Intimacy, however, is not an interest shared by Dan Mills, whose very public approach is to apply color to large printed maps by painting over their written information, returning the cartographer’s data exertions back into the drawn and painted renderings that all maps really are. Though most of the work failed to transcend the obvious gimmick, there were notable exceptions: Bleed (52) displays genuine painterly authority, and Outtake A’s (2013) extended strokes offers a winning digression from the motif. They work because they do not rely on their maps per se.

Those of us occupying the lower echelon of art-world actors struggle to resist what often seems like structural hostility toward an art of circumspection. But as the struggle continues I suppose we have to make the most of available opportunities. The organizers of these six exhibitions may not have been able to provide optimal viewing conditions for their artists, but it proved enough.

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There’s a paradox at the heart of how we experience art. While we may take pride in being art-literate, we absorb much of our knowledge of art (as for life itself) in unconscious fashion. Scrupulous study and debate may guide our understanding, but these are no substitute for the education we continuously and unknowingly receive through our eyes.

This is a very particular kind of education. Eyesight may be no more than the recording of countless ricocheting electromagnetic vectors, but it permits a startlingly rich connection with, say, a tree; the act of looking is a miraculous mapping of another miracle in the natural world. It’s an experience unknown to a person born unsighted, who may otherwise acquire every bit of knowledge about history, science, and human nature.

It’s no wonder that over a quarter of our brains are involved in processing visual stimuli, and that it takes new-born babies months to fully see. And no wonder so many great artists said they wished they could see like a child. Seeing truly, without habit or bias, was crucial. Many an artist could muster a sense of style and technique, but the masters surpassed at something more intuitive and unique to painting: the ability of giving pictorial momentousness to a figure’s gesture, or an apple’s location. Thank your eyes, then, and that quarter-part of your mind, if some mysterious power in a Titian, seen in the flesh, moves your sensibility in ways that defy your intellect.

This is an aesthetic not well suited to our time, when communications too often resemble talking points: fast, smart, exchanges that are instantly transmittable and promise quick mastery of a subject. We settle for very imperfect substitute-images in print and computer screens. Rather than asking ourselves if we are really seeing, we tend to seek new analyses of what we habitually see.

All of which highlights the indispensability of exhibitions like “Nature is the Teacher” at The Painting Center. “Nature lies in the faithfully observed motif and equally in the analytically invented form,” reads a sentence from the unsigned essay accompanying the show, and indeed the work of the four participating painters—Simon Carr, Stanley Lewis, Thaddeus Radell, and Deborah Rosenthal—argues cogently for the interdependence of visual awareness and artistic tradition. Connecting this diverse group of artists—and having become acquainted with each of them over the years, I can attest they are thoroughly different spirits—is the common urge to re-create nature in the language of paint. But their styles vary tremendously, and their diverse pursuits of narrative, symbolism, or process make for an exceptionally handsome installation.

Carr’s scenes of subways come the closest here to traditional realism. His heightened colors, however, lend remarkable robustness to figures, locating not just their physicality but their character. In one lushly scumbled canvas, the dramatic depths of a subway car interior, viewed from one end, encompass a nuzzling couple, kinetic drummers, and a distant LED sign, with colors somehow imparting independent life to each. In another, commuters bustle across a subway platform, but the scene centers about the yawn of a single child. In Carr’s canvases, all means of description and technique ultimately serve humanist ends.

Though his landscapes also depict real scenes, Lewis’ narratives concern the processes of observation and painting. Pictorially, the artist risks the most of any painter in the show, working with a kind of steady ferocity to rebuild appearances in fragmenting marks and planes. Weighted color and line yield poignant truths: a tree, thickly encompassing space among its branches, presides above a yard with a toy cart; totem-like structures punctuate the unfolding panorama of a public garden.

Radell’s surfaces, too, have the quality of weathered layering, but in more luxuriant, affirmative fashion. The artist constructs figures in arabesques of looping black outlines, with interior pinks set off by luminous blues and green-grays. The matte depth of his wax medium and his feathering colors conjure an idyllic atmosphere, with actual volumes mattering less than sensations of movement, light, and depth. Though identities are unclear—the figures might be warriors or shepherds—the paintings hum with the impulse to leaven modernist idioms of painting with echoes of tradition.

Although the most abstracted work here, Rosenthal’s compositions of organic, geometric forms and calligraphic marks abound with intimations of lyrical events. Peaked shapes, lofting across the upper portions of “Uphill and Down” (2011), might be distant mountains or sheltering tents. Exact significations are less clear, and less crucial, than the sense of a poetic journey and its attendant tribulations. The canvas is one of the artist’s two largest in the show, which both use color especially effectively, their varied, deep reds sounding against subdued violets and jolts of vivid green.

Time was, painters learned through their eyes, just as musicians did through their ears and dancers through their bodies. Due to the sheer complexity of nature, and the infinite possibilities of paint, it was a lifetime education. “Nature is the Teacher” reflects these four artists’ shared commitment to this learning, and reminds us how the one faculty of sight can lead to very different truths.

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After 16 years in SoHo, the Painting Center opens its doors in Chelsea at a new location at 547 West 27th Street on the 5th Floor.  Their inaugural show opens on April 13 with a group invitational show titled Continuing Color Abstraction, curated by Rella Stuart-Hunt the main gallery and Phillis Ideal: Recent Paintings in the Project Room.

The move was precipitated by in increase in rent at the old location, which members and the Board of Advisors decided to turn into an opportunity to seek a more advantageous location.  They share the 547 West 27th Street building with many other prestigious galleries including Cheim & Read, Aperture, Ceres Gallery, Dinter Fine Art, Hendershot, Flomenhaft, Foley, M.Y. Art Prospects, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, Sputnik Gallery, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Soho 20 and more.

The Painting Center members and Advisory Board are excited and energized by the move and hope the new, more accessible location will allow them to broaden the audience and develop new outreach and education initiatives.  The Painting Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is dedicated to the exploration of painting in all its forms.  Founded in 1993 by 12 painters, the Center hosts approximately 20 exhibitions per year and plans to continue its commitment to support the work of emerging, mid-career and under-represented artists; and continue its legacy as a vital and dynamic place for painters and those who love painting.  04/11/10

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Craig Manister’s new group of landscape paintings continue a movement toward figuration in this painter’s work of the last decade or so. He began in the 1970s as a student of abstract expressionists Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof who influenced Manister’s early abstractions with their weighty surfaces and splendorous color divisions; he also had affinity with such contemporaries as Thornton Willis and Stuart Hitch.

At first glance, Manister’s present works recall Seurat in his pre-pointillist phase, with their bas-relief-like planar structure, rhythmic angular brushstrokes, and rich divisions of  color.  But whereas Seurat was moving from naturalism to abstraction, Manister’s abstraction began to imply figuration without direct study of specific landscapes. The lollypop trees and breadbox houses are certainly more symbol than freshly observed fact recalling neoclassical Picasso, Derain and the Italian Metaphysical painter Carlo Carrà.

Certainly Manister’s ‘keyhole”’ figures are decidedly Metaphysical: Excessively cartoonish, they are jarringly graphic within the otherwise naturalistic rendering of landscape. These animated keyholes are a motif surviving from Manister’s abstract paintings.  Sometimes they appear as solids, at other times as voids.  They seem intended as both mystery and deliberate trademark, both subject and lacuna.

In Figures with Bridge (2008) the eye of the viewer zig-zags in space from overlapping plane to plane,  neoclassic style.  The little keyhole figures recall the tiny people in a Poussin, in their diminished relationship to architecture and sky. In Large Figures with Tree and Mountain(2009) we find monumental key holes (literally reading as holes in the canvas) looming over a horizon.

Figure and Houses with Reflections (2009) comes together as both an homage and affectionate parody of the masters. Referencing one of Corot’s iconic motifs, the “Ville d’Avrey,” the faintly comic keyhole lovers languish in a severe Gallic landscape, perhaps dreaming along with Manister of the depth and mysteries of the great western canon.

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on show until November 22 at the Painting Center (Project Room), 52 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand, 212-343-1060

Ying Li’s attack in these ten charcoal portraits shows the same unique blend of impetuosity and rigor as her paintings. Outlines criss-cross and flail, contours twist, and details emerge and dissolve without discernable method. And yet we’re left, remarkably, with likenesses that seem all the more human for the struggle. Seldom is orneriness so empathetic, and ferocity so astute.

This was an artcritical PIC in November 2008.

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September 6 – October 1st, 2005

By JOE WALENTINI

The Painting Center’s two exhibitions in September found common ground between three very different painters in a painterly approach to abstraction.  Emily Berger and Iona Kleinhaut divided the large space in the gallery into a 2–person show of paintings and works on paper. Farrell Brickhouse took command of the project room with a suite of smaller paintings and works on paper.

Emily Berger & Iona Kleinhaut

Emily Berger’s paintings free-associate with the grid – at least as a starting point.  But her exploration of form is actually more vested in an architectural urban esthetic. The evidence for this is found in the density and uneven distribution and proportions of her lines. Berger also, quite literally, throws a curve in here and there to further disturb any sense of order. Her application of materials sublimely captures the messiness and accompanying noise and motion of a large city (generally New York; more specifically, Brooklyn where the artist lives and works).

Iona Kleinhaut explores a very different range of forms in which the structure is generically organic. Her shapes suggest everything from micro-biology to floral themes to landscapes to celestial references. An oblique comparison to Terry Winter’s paintings from the 80s and 90s pops up in some of these pieces. This is evident in the way the distinctly organic-like forms float over richly painted and colorful surfaces. Then there is the contrast between the loose handling of paint and color with the solidly, structured compositions which places Kleinhaut in full possession of the picture plane.

What unites the artist, most obviously, is the physicality of their materials.  While providing a pleasant esthetic experience this approach more importantly serves as a driver for defining both the subject matter and content of the work. Both artists derive visual energy for their paintings by pitting their application of the medium against the somewhat formal structure of their individual subject matter. For Berger, this is manifested in her animated sense of cityscape, whereas for Kleinhaut, it is found in her non-narrative yet strong references to organic nature.  Ultimately, both artists stay within the realm of the abstract by not accessing their corresponding subject matter directly which also leaves understanding of the work open to elucidation.

One other similarity is the quality of drama both artists employ, primarily in their use of light and shadow.  For Berger’s works on paper, a personal, rather moody, even somber ambiance is established.  However, just the opposite occurs with her paintings which are lighter, colorful and more open while still maintaining a personal touch. In Kleinhaut’s case contrast is skillfully woven into the color. The resulting drama in her pieces is also personal but less direct, more complex and occurs on a grander level.

Each of these artists presented work that is powerful, engaging and demanding of a generous measure of ‘breathing space’. For this reason the exhibition might have been better served with a bit less work.  Still, the range of proportions for these pieces mitigates any over-crowding while also providing dimensional variety.

Farrell Brickhouse

Although Farrell Brickhouse went solo in the smaller project room space, his work nicely compliments the show in the larger room. The connection is his overt use of the medium where paint handling and form are virtually indistinguishable from each other in most of these pieces. Subject matter primarily consists of generic iconic images which leave interpretations open. But the imagery takes a back seat to the paint handling which really defines the subject matter and content for this work. There is nothing preconceived about these paintings; rather, they seem to have been born through years of experience mastering painting. From this perspective the forms are more ‘found’ through the act of painting than merely depicted.

For their size these diminutive paintings manage to pack quite a punch.  This is obvious in the raw paint handling and crude rendering of the forms.  But a closer look reveals a counterpoint subtlety of color, surface and blended contrast which, combined with the former treatment, is equally responsible for the impact. The result plays directly into understanding the content by establishing a self-possessed authenticity; a real visual experience devoid of illusions or depictions that is only possible through experientially-created abstract art. The ability to pull this off truly designates Brickhouse as ‘a painter’s painter’.

The Painting Center’s Project Room space is long, narrow and characteristically difficult to work with. In response Brickhouse has included small to medium paintings including a single scatter-gun arrangement that comprises 12 small pieces grouped tightly together.  Given the constraints and the minute sizes of these pieces this is quite effective, especially given the artist’s desire to capture a bit of a studio visit ambience. The presentation reads as a singular installation and contrasts sweetly with the other paintings in the show.

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“Ying Li” at the Painting Center until February 28 (52 Greene Street, 2nd Floor, between Broome and Grand Streets, 212-343-1060). Prices: $1,800-$4,000.

“Marc Quinn” at Mary Boone Gallery until February 28 (541 West 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-752-2929). Prices: $125,000-$140,000.

Jackson Pollock famously answered an inquiry about his influences with a belligerently short shortlist: Picasso and Albert Pinkham Ryder. A valid description of Bill Jensen – who is himself an eloquent and impassioned supporter of the maverick American romantic – would be a synthesis of Pollock and Ryder.

Like Pollock, Mr. Jensen is blessed with lyricism of line, a kind of suprapersonal calligraphy that is nonetheless intensely his own. But his brush is always tempered, questioned, energized by awkwardness: He is like the young Pollock in temper, mature Pollock in fluency.

Which is where Ryder, with his oxymoronically dark luminosity, comes in. Although Mr. Jensen’s palette is nothing like Ryder’s-the American master was a reckless experimenter with bitumen– it has something of hisspiritual weight. Mr. Jensen’s more recent work – some of which is hanging at Danese Gallery – reveals newfound chromatic boldness. This show brings together two series of works, both from last year: a densely colored and textured set, “Duo Duo,” worked in egg-and-oil tempera, and “Drunken Brush,” a predominantly black-and-white set whose appropriately Zen-like title signals a close affinity with Oriental calligraphy.

A “salt of the earth” quality to Mr. Jensen’s color still reinforces the sense of his rootedness in nature, however. He seems at times to be willing himself to become an agent of nature, refusing to settle for being a mere transcriber of its surfaces. He replaces some of the intellectual ambition to be found in Terry Winters (an artist he sometimes resembles) or in Thomas Nozkowski, with an innocencenot to be found in these more canny practioners.
His achievement, however, is to embrace the spiritual without going gooey.

In eloquent denial of William James’s distinction between tough- and tender-mindedness, his forms and touch reveal traces of both. [no break]In similar vein, he collapses the dichotomy of fast and slow: The movements he describes and embodies seem, like geological forces, at once wayward and inevitable. They evolve at a mind-numbingly gradual pace yet suddenly jerk forward cataclysmically.
To my eye, Danese has overhung Mr. Jensen’s dense, tense, and exhaustive paintings by around 30%, which will mislead cursory visitors with an impression of repetition and sameness. To the converted, however, this testing hang is an added incentive for repeat visits.

For a more traditional but no less spirited pursuit of the lyrical in landscape, be sure to catch Ying Li’s show at SoHo’s Painting Center before it closes this weekend. Eighteen works reveal bewildering diversity both of influence and of pictorial ambition.

She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness.

Often, in works that look to Turner or Boudin or to more contemporary examples like Louis Finkelstein or Stuart Shils, Ms. Li is inspired to gorgeous but familiar effects, to a comfortable expression of the pleasures of landscape. In other works, she pushes further towards abstraction, almost offering a pastiche de Kooning, for instance, in “Riverstroke #1” (2003), but with no less tasteful a result.

Only in two or three works, however, does a restlessness reveals itself, an indication that jouissance is not enough. “Vermont, Deep Fall” (2003), for instance, shares the frenzied logic of Soutine to suggestthat expressiveness and a sense of structure need not be mutually exclusive. Ms. Li’s best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.

Marc Quinn has always been one of the more thoughtful of the “YBAs,” the notorious band of young Brits collected in the 1990s by Charles Saatchi. True, Mr. Quinn went for the jugular with “Self” (1991), a self-portrait head made of 8 frozen pints of his own blood, but his work is usually richer and more historically layered than that of his shamelessly shallow and opportunistic peers.

His current show at Mary Boone finely balances the poignant and the prurient. He has had 11 carvings made of people with missing or deformed limbs, victims of birth defects or misadventures. These enervatingly literal carvings have the deathly dullness of the neo-classical Bertel Thorvaldsen. But by finding models of a certain readymade modernity, Mr. Quinn can be said to have married the academicism of that dreary Dane with the biomporphic oddity of Henry Moore or Arp – a fusion typical of Britain’s young neo-conceptualists.

Mr. Quinn was shortlisted for a competition staged at London’s National Gallery recently for a work for the empty pedestal in Trafalgar Square. He chose to depict Alison Lapper, a thalidomide child, now grown and in an advanced state of pregnancy. He argued that it complemented Horatio Nelson atop his column on two counts: overcoming handicap is as heroic as fighting for one’s nation, while the admiral is famously missing a limb and an organ.
Seen alone, Ms. Lapper was indeed heroic. But amassed in a whole Valhalla of the deformed and the maimed, Mr. Quinn’s project begins to seem a little sick. That said, the figures are of handsome, strong, and athletic men and women, dignified in the titles with their real names. If they inspire some viewers to confront their own squeamishness and preconceptions about beauty and wholeness, they will have achieved something.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 26, 2004

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February 3-28, 2004

Painting is as old as, well, the hills around Lascaux or Altamira-and yet painters are still finding ways of challenging our expectations. When we walk into a gallery today, we’re liable to be struck by the curiousness of an image and by original ideas about processes and roles of painting. We might even encounter a couple things that seem to have preoccupied those 30,000 year-old cave painters: a delight in the materials of painting and its language of forms.

The current exhibition of work by Ying Li at the Painting Center reminds us why these virtues have endured so long. These eighteen landscapes, with their thick encrustations of oil paint, turgid colors, and lashing strokes, positively exude an enthusiasm for paint’s sheer materiality. (Having visited the artist’s studio a number of times over the years, I can attest to the splatters of pigment covering walls, ceiling and floor. By way of disclosure I should also mention my ownership of an earlier Li painting.) Li’s furious reworking of shapes and all-over kneading of surfaces suggests something of Pollock’s wing-and-a-prayer attack: the self-regenerating, free-fall meditation that hangs all hope on the moment and the complete banishment of PRE-meditation. Indeed, after a few moments with Li’s livid hues and violent, contrary strokes, Pollock’s sweeping gestures can seem almost MELLOW.

Expressive as it is, though, the vivid paint-handling serves as just a conveyance for other, perhaps more interesting, impulses. Li’s eagerness to sling paint belies a subtler, simultaneous purpose that on the surface (no pun intended) may seem strangely at odds with painterly abandon. As a representational painter, she builds complex connections towards elements of nature, and with her solid grasp of pictorial forms she imparts in her best paintings an emphatic sense of size, weight, location, role-that is, PRESENCE-to the elements of her images.

Sounds old-fashioned? Li certainly uses the motifs and material of a traditional artist, but she employs them with rare verve and honesty. If an illustrator communicates a likeness through referencing details (two eyes, a nose, and a mouth make a face), then a painter organizes more primitive sensations to re-create an optical event (a shadowed recess, a projection into light, a declining plane give weight to the impression of a face under a particular illumination.) Li PAINTS the landscape, and does so without any kind of safety net. Her contours form an almost brutal spatial framework for the actions of her color, and within it her hues, jostling forwards and back in space, link in forceful sequences across the canvas. The effect can be felt at its most basic level in a painting like the tiny “Montecastello, Sky Series #2,” in which a small hut plays a large and distinct role: its rectangular side (practically a single swipe of vivacious ochre) is pressed to the canvas’ lower edge by its dense green roof; above, the 80 percent of the canvas that is sky flows out luxuriantly in a sea of blues ranging from cerulean to traces of ultramarine. The weights of colors provide the timing of these events-the placing, the holding, then the release-so that this one or two square feet of canvas brims with the sensation of vast space.

Colors and blunt drawing collaborate again to animate the entirely different space of “Riverstroke #2”. In this forest scene, furious green-blue scribbles emphatically locate a softly lit plane (a distant field?) behind taut verticals of trees which, as they rise, trap bits of sky against the canvas’ upper corners. Once more the audacity of attack startles. There’s clearly no preconception of composition; all rests on a visual response and the possibility of making pictorial sense of a hundred sensations.

In the more complex “Vermont, Deep Fall,” an irregular, hour-glassed shape of dull cerulean blue, hemmed in by contrasting patches of brown-green and greenish-ochre, stares back from a remote but insistent location in the mid-distance. It doesn’t take imagination-only an active engagement in the painting’s rhythms-to see that this is a river receding between banks of overlapping walls of foliage. The frontal towering of the foreground tree, the contraction of the banks kneeling at the river’s far side, the water lithely slipping in-between, joining near and far: Li’s formal arrangements of these loaded events is every bit as vital as her violent brushwork. (Intriguingly, the “realistic” touches-the sky’s perforations of a tree’s canopy-compete with fantastic ones-the grayish-yellow-green patch somehow residing comfortably in the sky-all of which only shows that the connecting impulse of good painting is not literalism but pictorial coherence.)

One might suspect that for Li the paint-slinging technique is indispensable for a focusing of intention, but for the viewer it’s more like a conspicuous raising of the stakes, one that risks uneven results but also makes triumphs like these all the sweeter. Not every painting in the exhibition in fact has the impact of “Vermont, Deep Fall” with its powerful particularizing of forms. At times Li’s gestures convey the urge to come to grips with the subject more than they actually illuminate it. But considering that this is a characteristic of a great deal of expressionist painting (the Neo-expressionists who came to fame in the 80s are especially good at showing more grasping than grasp), this is the occasional shortfall one gladly accepts in view of the intensity and bravery of the work here. And brave it consistently is, pressing the bounds of technique, of motif (with images ranging from immense panoramas to close-ups of water), and fashion (who else would dare paint-sincerely-a waterfall in 2004?)

The impulse of a good artist is always a generous one, and ultimately it’s to share a memorable visual event. Ying Li’s paintings at the Painting Center offer just such a gift. They are visions of vigorous abandon, and the attendant truths-purely visual ones-that are her hard-bitten prize.

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