Known for her large-scale sculptural commissions for parks, zoos and corporations, Arlene Slavin's new paintings represent a point of departure in both sensibility and scale. Quietly poetic contemplations of weather and time, in abstracted landscape format, these paintings evoke seasons, days and hours; articulating iconic tree silhouettes in an imaginary, deeply atmospheric space. The paint is applied in thin washes that allow light to filter through, echoing the luminosity of light on misty days and moonlit nights.
Some works, such as Green Mist, with its watery evocation and sense of submerged silence, and Twin Pines Night, whose inky sapphire blues and aquas recall midnight, veer towards pure abstraction; color field with a whispered allusion to landscape. The gentle blue shape over a scumbled white ground of Mist Maples bears a vague resemblance to trees, but could just as easily be read as a modernist abstraction; while Sudden Storm is almost narrative, with its dappled golden lights that give way to the impending storm of deep violets sweeping
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| Arlene Slavin Morning Light Cypress #2, 2002. Acrylic on Canvas. 30 x 48 inches. Courtesy: Fischbach Gallery. |
Through 2/8
JOYCE KOROTKIN