Review of Amy Feldman's "Dark Selects" at Blackston Gallery

In & Out, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 75 x 80

The paintings included in Amy Feldman’s debut solo show “Dark Selects” (all works 2012) all convey a sense of quick efficient activity constrained by the unity of the single driving impulse: as if a rush of practiced activity could be a way of chasing after one clear yet multifaceted thought. Each work is an initially flat-seeming grey-on-white abstract composition that is revealed upon closer inspection to preserve, to varying degrees, some traces of their painterly production – some drips, light scumbling, and over-lapping brush-strokes. The thin nearly consistent application of paint makes the presence of intermittent drips and off-hand, apparently unfinished areas seem initially incongruous while their overall flat opacity allows them to seem integrated, however tenuously. It’s this dichotomy of form and material held in an unusual and fragile harmony that generates their most unusual effects.

That is, from a certain distance the quirky elegance of her compositions seems like an unlikely result of the gestural intensity implied by the drips. But up close this sense of reserve evaporates and the exact opposite impression occurs: the overall coherence of the whole seems like a contrived or artificial product of an alternately haphazard or deliberately off-hand patch-work of marks. It is weird and destabilizing but also thrilling to see paintings that seem almost at odds with themselves. For instance, in Owed – a large circular donut shape with repeated semi-circular edges like a cartoon cloud (or anus) - the subdued coherence of the work fragments completely, reveals itself to be an utterly provisional, almost an accidental product of these accumulated visceral efforts.

Owed, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80.

Look at them even closer; put your nose right up to the surface of All or Nothing, for example, and you’ll find something else entirely: a fine spritzing of tiny speckles (like paint applied by flicking the bristles of a brush loaded with watery thin paint) distributed almost uniformly across the canvas. From farther back these speckles dissipate into a vague texture accentuated by hazy accumulations, as if offering an amorphous vibrational counter-point to the svelte grey composition. Despite her works remarkable clarity, she’s determined how their effects might differ dramatically with viewing distance or, even, how a slight shift in perception might reveal a vastly different aspect or attitude. They also play with our perception of time. Far from seeming merely quick, these speckles demonstrate how these paintings are actually crafty, pain-staking, and calculated

In & Out, for instance, features a series of concentric not-quite-circles – more like round-corned wobbly off-kilter rectangles – that seems to recede into space inconsistently and then waver as the well-calibrated negative space asserts itself. Despite its relative simplicity, it seems unpredictable in a way – as if all the capricious choices of a virtuosically idiosyncratic hand give it, spatially, a complex ambiguity. The edges of the forms seem to waver and undulate. By painting over the edges of the frame and harnessing the figure/ground relationships into an unexpected optical illusion, Feldman also manages give the painting the sense that it’s about to defy physics – to warp and weave like a glitch in the Matrix. This effect is echoed in All or Nothing – a riff on Kenneth Noland’s famous Chevron paintings. The double “V” formation is contained in a vertical banner form that seems ready to start flapping in some illusory breeze and wrest itself free of its physical support any minute.

All or Nothing, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 96 x 80

She also demonstrates how even a simple form, in the most capable hands, can become fraught and out-of-control - subject to entropy, destabilization, or implosion - once it gets too big. She’s made a point of finding the line that separates control from chaos and then stepping just over that line. In this sense, the flat graphic quality of her work is a measure of her control, confidence, and familiarity with her own visual language, while the drips, which seem almost too neat or consistent but also incongruous, become an index of her anxiety. They’re accidents, that is, but accidents on purpose (as they say.) Far from being just an ostensibly incidental by-product, it just might be that it is these “accidents” which (by adjusting all of the other variables) she’s been conspiring to engineer all along.

Other Reviews and blog posts about Amy Feldman:
Roberta Smith
Anaba
Two Coats of Paint
Howard Hurst