January 24 to February 15, 2014
515 West 26th Street, First Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-239-8700

Ena Swansea hasn’t been seen in a solo exhibition in New York City since 2007, although in the interim her career has flourished with exhibitions in Germany, Luxembourg, Seoul, Philadelphia (her fall outing at Locks Gallery was covered by The Review Panel Philadelphia) and a major project at a bullring in Spain. (She also features in the exhibition “Come Like Shadows,” curated by this writer at Zürcher Studio, on view through February 23.)  The extensive show of her paintings together with a prototype design of a pair of sofas at Friedman Benda, therefore, now in its snow-gripped final days, is a chance to take note of the progress and productivity of one of the more eccentric painterly realists active today.

Overlapping with strong recent showings of artists Lois Dodd, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, it is possible to think of Swansea as an extension of New York School perceptual realism into a pop-synthetic arena.  Working from photography and imagination, as well as remembered perception, Swansea brings sheer delight at the potential of expressive marks and manipulated materials to depict actual if quirky scenes and forms.  Her mode is especially well suited to realms of darkness and artifice—this can be lights shining at night on stumps in the Hudson or banks of snow in Central Park, works which most closely recall Katz as well as fellow Katzians Robert Berlind and Peter Doig, such as It’s Morning Already? (2014), shown in a black-walled interior gallery.  But her painterly subterfuges (brushy silken strokes atop layers of liquid graphite) seem especially suited to internal nocturnes – nightlife, crowded bars and cabarets and more louche entertainments.  It is as if her sleights of brushstroke, in turn brazen and furtive, gravitate instinctually towards libido and inebriation. The slippery, bronzed flesh of the androgynous performer closest to the viewer in Go Go Dancers, (2013) seems to melt into the mottled background like celluloid catching fire, frangible at the very moment of allure, as if scorched by our own voyeuristic gaze.

A coincidence of former day jobs might be said to condition her artistic personality.  Swansea, who is from North Carolina, trained in photojournalism and first worked in TV news.  Once she had determined to be a painter she supported herself through high-end interior décor painting – think ragroll cloudscapes in corporate lobbies.  These day jobs are emblematic of the extremes that reconcile in Swansea’s supercharged dualistic visions with their headline motifs and fetish finishes.  A natural for extending her painting interests into sites of luxury and invention, when she was invited to exhibit by Friedman Benda, a gallery with a special interest in the decorative arts, she did so on condition of collaborating with them on a long-cherished furniture idea.  Her serpentine Night and Day Reversible Sofa, (2014) has reversible cushions in sumptuous synthetic white fur on the daylight recto, somewhat kinky in purity but nonetheless contrastive with the prints from details of her own paintings, (including Strawberry, of Nastassja Kinski in Tess on view in “Come Like Shadows”) on the after hours verso.

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Artists, inevitably, are captivated by movies.  Many in this show manifest their infatuations in their work, and in a variety of ways.   French artist Marc Desgrandchamps, for instance, gravitates – in his work in general and in his two lithographs in the present exhibition – towards scenes that embody a cinematic sense of flux while tapping modernist conventions of transparency and montage.   Angela Dufresne, in her two paintings, fixes upon scenes that are simultaneously iconic and perverse.  Dawn Clements, in a giant drawing in ballpoint pen, Jessica Drummond in Bed (My Reputation, 1946), 2012, the largest work in the show, exploits the subliminal sense of a movie playing on TV in a domestic situation, with obsessive notation blurring boundaries between inner and outer projections. Duncan Hannah casts Nova Pilbeam, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British movies, in a scene of Hannah’s own devising that pays three-way homage to – and emphasizes connections between – his beloved Nova, Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper.  Seduction and self-absorption are recurring leitmotifs, meanwhile, in images of other actors “starring” in the exhibition, whether Elle Fanning in lithographs by Will Cotton, Nastassja Kinski in a painting on liquid graphite by Ena Swansea, or Jeanne Moreau in a work by Dufresne.

Cotton is joined by a number of printmakers in this exhibition for all of whom variation within repetition is as much an expressive or thematic element as it is a technical or publishing factor.  His own pair of lithographs plays an optical game, when hung together as they are here, that recalls the transitions from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz.  In prints by abstract sculptor Willard Boepple and painter and sculptor Steve Locke the variation and repetition of screens generate or propel the imagery.  Locke is represented by four from a set of 13 lithographs, Rapture, 2009, which envision sexual encounters in which one party, a believer, is “saved” in flagrante delicto, leaving only his clothing behind—but mid action.  There is further play between iconography and process as the prints repeat stenciled groupings from plate to plate with one pair or group highlighted in each work.  In a comparable way, the stencils used by Willard Boepple in his screenprint monoprints are colored uniquely and sequentially within sets of identical configuration so as radically to alter perspective, depth and even form in otherwise unchanging structures.

Like Boepple’s hard-edge glyphs, the evocative, painterly, ethereal monotypes of Stuart Shils explore possibilities of shadow and trace in phenomenological ways that accent the more literary allusions that abound elsewhere in the show.  He exploits to the utmost the suggestion of ghost image in the palimpsest of the monotype plate.  The ghost within the image is accentuated in the three unique works by Nicole Wittenberg that recall a printmaking sensibility by deploying contrasting painterly approaches to a same appropriated photograph by Paul Outerbridge, which image itself recalls Northern Renaissance paintings of the mother of mankind with all its implications of temptation and generation.

A number of artists share – if without the eschatology – Locke’s collision of realism and abstraction as a means to literalize absent presence.   In works on paper by French artist David Lefebvre, for instance, oil painted hard-edge bars or geometric shapes of color intervene in evenly modulated graphite drawings in which orders of what is real and what is stylized, what is natural and what is schematic, are subverted; blocked-out shapes come to signify lacunae in the field of vision. Matt Bollinger’s fracturing of a boy’s head, recalling the faceting of cubism, evokes the mirroring ghost of split identity. And in cool yet voluptuous graphic images painter Alexi Worth explores the interaction of depicted shadow and the actual mesh screening material of his support with deft pictorial wit.

Also incorporating interplay of depicted shadow or shadowy activity into the conceptual fabric of her work is German painter Kerstin Drechsel.  Her sweaty snapshot-like depictions of lesbian nightclub play constitute a kind of tender voyeurism in their intimate, delectable facture, resonating across the show with a small scene from Rear Window by Dufresne and with the artful misregistrations of a Shils monotype.

And here, by way of conclusion, or perhaps introduction, is the personal, curator’s statement offered with the exhibition.

“As a boy of sixteen I worked as a bank messenger, dashing around London with documents to be signed and contracts to be sealed, mostly using the tube to get from Holborn to the West End or the City.  At that time, I was quite obsessed by Tess of the D’Urbervilles: the novel, the movie, the character.  I played a game with myself on each errand that if I passed the poster for Polanski’s Tess (then on general release) a given number of times in my subterranean peregrinations I would win the hand of Nastassja Kinski.  I became expert in strategically positioning myself in the right carriage so that, say, at Chancery Lane I’d maximize the number of posters along my route.  The rules were quite strict: I was not allowed to retrace steps or deliberately miss an exit.  Gradually and surreptiously, other ads began to supplant my beloved poster as the Tess campaign wore off and the posters would be covered up or torn away.  As if Tess’s fate and Nastassja’s languid gaze were not poignant enough, an insipid sensation of absence crept in, of the vacated spot.  The memory or trace of her visage began to fade in a deepening recession, lost in the shadows of romantic impossibility.”

on view through February 16, 2014 at Zürcher Studio, 33 Bleecker Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery?, New York City, 212 777 0790 

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March 13 to September 26, 2005

“Greater New York” is a survey exhibition mounted periodically by PS1 to give an overview of exciting work done recently in or near New York by artists who are not household names.  Selected by curators from PS1 and MoMA, of which PS1 is an affiliate, the show is an almost overwhelmingly large assembly of works by 160 artists.  “Greater New York” has established itself as the antidote to Whitney Biennial, generally showing younger and more experimental artists In the current version of “Greater New York,” the old and the new clash with unexpected results.

Tactics that were popular in the 1990s, such as interventions, installations, and simultaneous work in various media look clichéd and lacking in inspiration, rather than showing a spark of rebellious genius.  Valerie Hegarty’s tree trunk, for instance, made of paste and cardboard and appearing to burst through the wall and floor of the museum, seems very safe, not at all disturbing to one’s perception of the museum space or subversively humorous.  David Opdyke’s “USS Mall,” a scale model of an aircraft carrier, whose top surface is composed of the details of a suburban mall and parking lot, functions only as a weak visual pun.  It lacks the sophistication to make any social critique and go beyond being a joke.  Another attempt at social comment, Elif Uras’ painting “He got Game,” depicts a culture obsessed with the possession and use of firearms.  In each case, these pieces are merely lazy ideas unsupported by technical skill, as uninteresting to look at as they are to think about.

There are “computer-aided” pictures, which is another way of saying pictures that have attempted to avoid the unavoidable need to know how to make something with one’s own hands in order to create an object that can bear more than several seconds’ observation.  Finally, there are several artists who believe that by working in diverse and what they consider to be unconventional media they are breaking from the traditional mold of the artist.  Of course this gambit (which has often been used to subvert the use of the art object as a market tool) is at least as old as Duchamp’s early work.  Here, it often has the result that perfectly respectable work in one medium is degraded by its random association with much weaker work in another medium.  Hope Atherton’s contribution is diminished when her ambitious painting The Watcher (acrylic on linen, 87 x 66 inches) is paired with a limp wall sculpture of a rabbit/unicorn.  Guy Benner takes up a whole gallery with a video of performers in ostrich suits, accompanied by the suits themselves, which add nothing.  Christian Holstad’s collages combine product logos in compositions whose inspiration goes beyond Pop mannerism, but this effect is undercut by his decision also to include a generic-looking floor installation.

Countering these  weaknesses there is a strong representation of work being done in the traditional mediums of painting, sculpture, film, photography, and (we now need to add) installation. Several installations reflect a thoughtful approach, as opposed to one that is mechanical or overly conceptual.  Wangechi Mutu’s piece combines collage with non-art elements in a harmonious ensemble.  Bozidar Brazda has two site-specific pieces.  One creates an image of a man camped out on a ledge outside a window, while the other, just beside the entrance to PS1’s large courtyard, is a real Jaguar XJ6, filled with books and straw.  The references these two pieces make are various.  One possibility is the museum director’s car, and in fact walking around the museum, not far away, one may find a single car, a BMW, parked inside the museum’s gates.  But the most evocative work of installation in the exhibition is Marc Swanson’s “Killing Moon 3 (Self portrait as Yeti in his lair),” which some viewers (though not those already familiar with PS1) might miss, as it is located in the basement, at the far end of the former boiler room.  Using the location to maximum effect, Swanson made a tableau that was poetic, and not at all ironic, despite the mythical figure central to its impact.  This white-haired being, also known as the Abominable Snowman, is seated on the floor, looking like a homeless person, surrounded by his scavenged belongings, or like someone who does not come from our planet (literally) and does not share our values.

In photography, Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits seem to have a new kind of light, and Gil Blank’s images of a man floating in water and of fireworks are simultaneously hip and serene.  Sue de Beer, who also has an exhibition currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Altrea Gallery on 42nd Street, creates installations in which to project her films.  What is really captivating is her mastery of conventional film language — her use of framing and narrative.  Rather than bringing conventional film language into fine art — as many artists have done — her work seems to yearn to break free of its self-imposed art world confines and simply exist in its natural habitat, the world of television and movies.  Film and video more firmly set in the art mode include  xurban_collective’s evocative stationary view of a city skyline at sunset, Abbey Williams’ effective coupling of footage of New York subway passengers with a rock soundtrack featuring sexy female vocals, and Pawel Woytasik’s enigmatic images of industrial systems that could be processing waste.

The real achievements in “Greater New York” are left to the most traditional media.  Adam McEwen’s huge piece uses a photograph of Mussolini and his girlfriend, Claretta Petacci, strung up in a square in Milan, after having been executed and beaten by a crowd on April 28, 1945.  The found photograph is merely the starting point for this remarkable work, in which McEwen inverts the photo, greatly enlarges it and mounts and frames it in such a way that the final image is an imposing one that mixes a horrible melancholy with the inexplicable levity of seeing these mutilated figures that appear to be gaily dancing and singing.  Sculpture makes a strong showing in various modes.  Will Ryman shows his plaintive papier mâché figures, famous by now on the New York scene, and Tobias Putrih has an effective installation of gradation of sheets of cardboard. Nathan Carter uses mundane materials — acrylic and enamel paint on cut plywood — to make a structure  at once suggestive of the observable world (it looks like a mountain ski village with pine trees) and insistent on its nature as built and painted sculptural relief.  Interesting forays into material are undertaken by Ryan Johnson, who uses cut paper and acrylic paint to make three-dimensional figures, Mickalene Thomas, who uses rhinestones with acrylic and enamel paint to make a reclining figure, and Taylor McKimens, whose small  mixed-media television set has a refreshing home-made quality to it.

The most significant achievements in recent New York art, as presented by “Greater New York,”  are in the area of painting.  There are few examples of paintings that simply illustrate an idea (and many of these can be seen around New York on a regular basis); instead, one finds a generous sampling of painters who seem involved with the implications of the paint medium and the seemingly limitless variety of ways to use it.  The first work one sees in the lobby is the large-scale tour-de-force effort Perfume II (Feb. 2003) (114 x 180 inches) by Cheyney Thompson, which depicts, in loving detail, a typical New York magazine and candy stand.  The unpainted canvas surrounding the image underscores the reality that this work is about the painting, not the idea of a newsstand as cultural artifact, let alone the role of commerce in contemporary life.  The stand is simply a fact anyone can observe in New York, and its detail is carefully rendered by Thompson without ever becoming precious.  Kristin Baker and Garth Weiser contribute powerful large-scale treatments — she in acrylic, relying on a scraping technique, he in oils whose paint is pushed or allowed to accumulate in waves that become an idea of form.  Angela Dufresne, Kurt Lightner, Kamrooz Aram, and Anna Conway, in different ways, exhibit inventive approaches to imagery and technique.

The two most successful painters in the exhibition, who really show a way to travel with the tradition of oil painting, are Dana Schutz and Ena Swansea.  While Swansea has only one painting, it is a doozy.  Entitled “devil on the road” (oil on graphite on linen, 56 x 56 inches), it depicts a bright red devil wearing glasses in a crouched position, as if about to pounce.  The paint is laid on in precise, meaningful strokes, and the color is blended expressively, while the figure’s shadow is effected by the lack of tan paint on the ground.  What does it mean to say a stroke of paint is meaningful?  It means that its fact of being exactly where and how it is resonates in the viewer the realization that this stroke really has to be, it should be, where it is.  Contrast this to the plethora of easily-made and easily-encountered meaningless brush strokes, which, by contrast, command no sense at all of having to be where and how they are, but instead give the feeling of having randomly landed where they are (in a setting where randomness is not prized).  Schutz’s strokes, likes Swansea’s, command the recognition of meaningfulness, yet they are quite different.  Swansea’s marks, though readily apparent, are subsumed into a larger pictorial narrative of the painting and image as a whole, while Schutz’s marks are expressionistic, in that each individual mark has a life of its own and often a color value of its own, distinguishing it from other nearby marks.  Schutz has a small painting, “Poisoned Man,” and a large tableau, “Presentation,” a picture of a huge corpse, laid out in front of a crowd of onlookers, who could also double as participants in a medical class.  The scale of her imagery is impressive.

“Greater New York” is successful partly because of its ambition and scope, but mainly because of the acuity of its curatorial eye.  It lets visitors to PS1 be aware that the newest things happening in the New York art world today are happening in the oldest mediums.

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“Ena Swansea: situation” at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert through October 9 (524 West 19th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212 807 9494)

“Lois Dodd: Flashings” at Alexandre Gallery through October 2 (Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue, 13th Floor, 212-755-2828)

Will Cotton’s latest paintings give new meaning to the term “eye candy.” His four canvas show at Mary Boone continues a photorealist preoccupation with the motif for which he is best known, confectionery, but forcibly fuses it, this time, with what had been a second subject, the erotic female nude.

Mr. Cotton’s candyscapes collide the genres of landscape and still life, constructing spatially ambiguous vistas out of perceptual and digestive excess. Usually there is a gaudy overload of sweet things, whether icecreams, chocolates, familiar mass-produced goodies like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, or toffees and caramels in a molten state, rendered in suitably sickly, saccherinne hues. His modus operandi is to photograph complex constructions of such stuff and render a painted image in a deadpan academic hand.

“Cotton Candy Cloud,” (2004) confines itself, with twisted restraint, to a single treat, cotton candy, unless we semantically join his sexist orgy and classify the voluptuous reclining redhead as a sweet thing, too. The puffing pinkness cannot begs to be read as an eponymous stand-in for the artist himself: its folds have the feel of musculature.

Art historically, the image overtly references Cabanel and Bougereau, the nineteenth-century “pompier” classicists, and in so doing recalls Mr. Cotton’s own education, which was completed at the New York Academy, which promotes “technique” in the beaux-arts sense of the word. Mr. Cotton’s nudes, more Vargas than Velazquez, lag behind his confectionery in sexiness.

The problem with them is that they come with baggage: The more he tries to make them voluptuous, the more they recall a grand tradition of which, by painting with giant quote marks around his own expressivity and curiosity, he can but be a testy footnote. They aren’t at all convincingly drawn from life, but nor is there an interesting sense that they derive from a specific kind of artifice, in the way, for instance, Cecily Brown uses hardcore pornography.

This deprives them of the warped frisson of vitality enjoyed by his cookies and chocs, ambiguously poised as they are between reality and artifice, a readymade pun as they are on the synthetic. On their own, the still-life motifs were intriguing, if not enticing, in a Jeff Koons kind of way. With the addition of his lethargic classicism his ice-cream melts away into silliness on a par with Lisa Yuskavage.

His delivery contrasts with the great modern master of the creamcake and spandex nude, Wayne Thiebaud, whose still startling images of pies and cheerleaders found in such proto-Pop imagery an apt metaphor for painterliness. Mr. Cotton’s images have some initial energy thanks to their kitsch overload of slick rendering, but that turns out to be the pictorial equivalent of a sugar boost. A Thiebaud is good enough to eat, but a Cotton gives you very little, aesthetically, to get your teeth into.

Ena Swansea also treads ground between artifice and reality, though with radically different results to Mr.Cotton’s. Her figuration eschews academic formula, and endures the awkwardness that inevitably arrives in its wake.

Her show is consequently uneven: some canvases are belabored by nerdishly rendered inanimate objects like an automobile or an air conditioner that upset the delicate ratio between transparency and opaqueness. And yet, other images are energized and animated by an equally pronounced but expressively more convincing awkwardness. Despite a couple of turkeys, the best paintings make this exhibition one of singular power and importance.

Like Mr. Cotton, Ms. Swansea had, earlier in her career, achieved a slick, contained, fully resolved still-life style before succumbing to the temptation of human subjects. In her case, ambiguous shadows cast by flora and vegetation produced images of compelling beauty. Her turn to figuration seems less a style gambit than an expressive necessity.

Her shadowplay led to experimentation with elaborate set-ups, in her case utilizing the camera oscura. The new imagery extends the photographic metaphor. One picture, of a child’s head, is entitled “color negative,” (2004): like all the works in the show, it is painted on a ground of graphite, a material of sinister ethereality, at once leaden and other-worldly.

Ms. Swansea can paint with exhilerating facility: “devil on the road,” (2004) an ambiguously poised, goggled and spandex-clad red demon casting his shadow on shimmering, near-molten asphalt is a suitably devilish display of convincing, beguiling and deft painterly sleights of hand.

The real show stopper, though, is a 15 foot long dinner party scene that recalls a Tintoretto last supper in its compressions and foreshortenings. This image, at once timeless and a painting of modern life, offers an appropriately enebriated perspective: the distorted still-life arrangements and stilted figure poses have the eye lurching between ease and alienation, speed and arrest. In its fusion of fluency and awkwardness this rich, complex work recalls Manet at his weirdest.

Short mention must be made of a compact display of tiny oil sketches by Lois Dodd at Alexandre, the septugenarian’s third show at that gallery in two years. Actually, the show, propped on ledges in the gallery’s foyer, warrants close attention-critical and appreciative: it is exquisite fun, and surveys 50 works from as far back as 1990.

These plein air paintings are done on roofer’s flashings, thin, aluminum panels of five by seven inches. As such, they are like postcards from the front line of observational painting. The medium, eccentric and yet practical and effective, is true to this artist’s character: Ms. Dodd is one of the true mavericks of American painting, a quietly audacious realist whose quirky, enigmatic, yet empirical and heartfelt observations of the rural scene make her the supreme “artist’s artist” of the New York school.

These lyrical yet hardnosed sketches capture, in completely unaffected simplicity, such phenomena as floral color contrasts, subtle noctornal lighting effects, movements of water, a shimmering breeze. At this size and speed, the artist’s affinities with her better known contemporary, Alex Katz, and their mutual mentor, Milton Avery, are clear, but so too is her utter individuality.

In scale, slickness, and “attitude” Ms. Dodd could not be further removed from either Mr. Cotton or Ms. Swansea, but she does share with the younger artists an intuitive sense that oddity and credibility can make happy bedfellows.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 16, 2004

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March 27-May 3, 2003

Ena Swansea achieved recognition in 1998-99 for a series of abstract paintings based on observations of lightfall in the landscape. Key to this work was a subtly colorized grisaille palette and layers of transparent paint. The restless gray forms suggested moving shadows and were widely appreciated for their ingenious equation of style and content. Critical response noted that a subtle but recurring theme in the history of painting had resurfaced in a smart new way.

Swansea’s debut exhibition at Klemens Gasser Tanja Grunert currently on view through May 3, 2003 features paintings dating from 1999 – 2003. Introducing figuration and text, it reconfigures Swansea’s repertoire of formal and stylistic elements. Surfaces vary from translucence to opacity or blinding shine on dark grounds; same goes for a few planes of lead-based white. Several of the most optically unconventional paintings start with graphite grounds that subvert color and squelch light altogether. They would seem to spring from unimaginable motives if not for Swansea’s known interest in the painterly paradox shadows represent (as the relative absence of light and color). Formats vary, but at medium to large size (88″ x 108″ the largest) most canvases project an ambitious physicality in the gallery’s skylit space.

The new work experiments with varying degrees and types of illusion and depiction in its figuration process. Swansea compounds the issue with allusions to famous paintings hybridized with portraits of friends and famous painting styles. Models from Manet and Vermeer appear; form-rendering techniques of old masters are used; the flatness of silkscreen and Warholian inversions of value come up (Warhol’s “Shadow Paintings” should perhaps be mentioned in passing). The late Degas has a fleeting presence due to some unusual, theatrical lighting effects and pastel tinted highlights on lips, noses, ears. Swansea’s graphite surfaces perhaps even recall Degas’s metal plate photos of ballet dancers in lurid, chemical reaction-tinged colors. All of this challenges viewers to flex their optic taste buds into new poses.

“]If the first group was derived from the observed landscape, the focus of the present group shifts inward, toward a psychological landscape. In a recent interview with Barry Schwabsky, Swansea reveals that she has been interested in theories of multiple personality, and set herself the challenge of investigating her painterly concerns “from behind”. She found a line in the Frank O’Hara poem In Memory of My Feelings that resonated with the kind of psycho-sexual introspection she was after: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.” (The text is stenciled twice on one of the paintings, “Man In It”.) Once one is aware of the O’Hara line, individual figures and pairs of figures on stylistically various paintings seem to interact with or separate from each other, as in a drama with endless episodes. Voices, thoughts, and feelings lie just beyond reach. Swansea is less attracted to multiple personality in the clinical sense than the garden variety neurosis most people experience, say, reading a novel or in dreams. O’Hara’s dreamlike image has this effect, and the author himself is a totem of Ab Ex. The quoted line lends an open conceptual structure, albeit a cryptic one, to the whole show.

Swansea’s interest in grisaille is still important and maintains its engagement with issues particular to abstract painting. But why graphite? Consider again that Swansea is interested in metaphor and working with the theme of multiple personality. As a black pigment, graphite is untrustworthy: dark for sure, but reflective also. Graphite, derived from carbon, is so slippery it’s used in car lubricants. In pencils, it’s ideal for both drawing and writing, activities as prone to erasure as productivity. Graphite facilitates movement of the hand on the page, which comes from thought in the mind. Swansea brings it to the surface, almost as subject matter in itself, an unreliable narrator to the oily brush strokes decription above it. The figures’ schematic mien seems to be an almost involuntary consequence. On the other hand, three paintings on oil-based white grounds show figurative elements fused with white shadow space: losing hold of ego in a camouflaged environment. Swansea suggests that the twilight zone of opticality is analogous to states of mind, awake or asleep, where consciousness and certainty are momentary.

Thus gliding over the slippery surfaces of the grounds, the new paintings’ blend of illustrational style, historical appropriation, petrochemicals, and text is the stylistic equivalent of an unstable psychological realm. Swansea’s first interest is abstraction, so her push of the early grisaille into this new territoryentails a certain amount of risk. From formal, stylistic, and conceptual angles, the new work projects a sense of contingency onto the positivist encounter with each canvas. It’s a good concept, but the outcome looks more often transitional than insightful in this group.

Notes on Individual Paintings
Portal, 2003
Like the Foreword to a book, the first painting one encounters while walking up the ramp to the gallery is a predominately dark canvas depicting a woman walking from sunlit greenery outdoors toward the dim metallic interior of a passageway. With her conservative attire of shirtwaist dress, purse, and heels, she could be entering a clinic and the gallery simultaneously, like the viewer. We enter the painter’s space together, perhaps.

Undecided, 2001-2002
A horizontally formatted depiction of a conversation between a woman and a man, rendered in transparent colors over a an oily black ground that switches like the nap of shiny velvet as the viewer moves around to see it. The blonde woman, suburbanly coiffed, has just spoken to him. His back is turned, one ear bright pink from the sound of her voice. Two black lines echo between them. Perhaps it’s better that we can’t hear what she said, what he heard, and so on.

Luncheon on the Grass, 2003

A monumental female figure crouches above a mecurial graphite field. She is seen from the back, from a hovering elevation, a schema rendered in close values accented by a few colorized highlights. A big brush describes her hair in burnt sienna, cut with bluish motor oil from certain angles, caught in a ponytail held by red elastic. The brush brakes for a pale ear, strokes the supple back, glides along a downy arm and, upon arriving at the model’s tennis wrist, reduces scale and halts in an attitude of erotic attention while bestowing an expensive watch. This negligent hand holds a picnic plate with a spoon glowing green and red at the edges, extends from the right knee at the end of its luscious long thigh. She is a composite: Manet’s famous nude luncheoner crossed with a friend’s portrait. Painted by multiple personalities or not, a ploy that incompletely masks a trained hand, it’s clear that Swansea takes pleasure in her technical facility.

Lie Down I Think I Want You, 2003
Defying gravity, two torsos stretch, mirror-like, from the left side of the picture field, on a graphite ground. The topmost, wearing a garment that looks most like a green choir robe, seems to scrutinize the other figure inconclusively. Myth like, they suggest Echo and Narcissus.

Antoine, 2002
A single head, a close up three-quarter portrait: set deeply with in close-hued mineral pigments, her white flecked globular eyes suggest a sea bird or mammal blinking miserably after an oil spill.

The Letter
One painting, not on display but easily taken out of the back, is a white on black homage to Vermeer called The Letter. Swansea crops the young woman’s face close to the dreaded sheet of paper. She, ghostily sketched, is visible thanks to a few deft strokes left by a stiff 3-inch or so brush oozing with white. The brush is negligently, yet specifically, dragged across her forehead and features in distorted perspective. Her ears, having read the letter, are “red”; but she maintains her composure through a new translation of Vermeer’s strategy for concentration. The distinctive pearl drop, tear drop earring on the ear which hears the news dances with antenna-like powers.

Fourth Marriage 3, 2003
At the white end of the spectrum, a little team of fairies dances through the cream blue and yellow shadows of lotus, ginkgo, and champagne-glass shaped flowers – as well as they might in a painting entitled “Fourth Marriage”. The wry humor is upscale: this much paint, cushioned by an oil-rich medium, slathered over the surface like icing on air. Here is an optimism that revels in success, space, and outdoor freedoms. Balanced, optically, to daylight.

Tiny Man, 1999-2003
The confident big brush swings through the model’s coiffure, slips past her face, rustles under her nightgown, and pops out under an evanescent line as the upward gazing face of… a tiny, but mature, conservatively dressed man. Father?

Out of Town Until the 26th, 2003
The hellish mood of a woman lying prone before an array of windows in a recovery clinic on a sunny afternoon is matched by a horizontal void inserted on her couch, as if to suggest that she were tipping into the crack of doom.. Of course, she never does; but the disposition of painterly elements is the more devilish for bubble-gum pink highlights stuck to her chin, lips and nose. Ick! Degas meets Nan Goldin in the glow of ghastly music hall gaslight, in the harshly lit cinder block asylum..

Man In It, 2001-2003
A young woman stands in the petal rich breeze, caught in some puzzle-like grayplanes cutting through the atmosphere. Frank O’Hara’s poem, In Memory of My Feelings, not in pencil but rendered twice: noticeably in hot pink stenciled letters, then again as mild dropped out text (in more austere typography) near the bottom of the image, as if fading away on curved space. The stenciled letters spell out, like an Ouija board: “My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.”

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