CHANGING VIEWS
What counts for the “abstractionists” is not the appearances of nature but the inner principles on which it’s organized. Judy Ledgerwood’s Pastoral has the texture of natural forms but doesn’t depict anything specific. Its mottled mix of colors–the dominant dark green interrupted by deep reds and yellows, each color varying in shade almost continuously–made me think of moss and lichen. At the upper right is a “clearing” of lighter green, suffused with radiant light, but too high in the picture to be an actual clearing in an actual forest.
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In one sense these three artists are echoing nature’s patterns, but each work can also be seen as a personal mind’s-eye vision–as nature interiorized, transformed. Two other artists in “Changing Views” also personalize nature, though the results are more amusing and conceptual.
Banicki’s paintings do have an interesting look: the small grids filled with multicolored boxes are like incredibly complex instrument panels or old IBM punch cards. But the idea of reducing natural things to linear ratings seems at first totally absurd, even obnoxious. Yet Banicki is so reductive it seems he must be conscious of the limitations of his “system.” And there’s something endearingly nutty about his whole project, which combines extensive research, including traveling, with highly arbitrary criteria for rating–a lake is rated higher, for instance, if he happens to catch a fish in it.
Of the works in “Changing Views” that do depict nature directly, about half are benign, pleasant views of trees and streams. The other half–about a quarter of the works in the show–are surprisingly troubled, or at least surprisingly removed from the reality they purport to identify. Even a work by the popular Wolf Kahn, the pastel Deep Magenta Sunset (a title that could be applied to most of his pictures), is odd: it seems to refer less to actual landscapes and sunsets than to painterly traditions–Monet, Matisse, Nolde. Yvonne Jacquette’s Madison Paper Company II, based on sketches and photos made from a chartered airplane, offers an overhead perspective like that of a survey map. Dan Graham’s two color photographs mounted together–Courtyard of Development, NJ and Row of Houses, NJ–present barren row houses, their forms repetitive and soulless, their windows staring out at the viewer like blank eyes unattached to any brain.
