JULIA FISH
I was not surprised to learn that Julia Fish cares very much about the work of Martin, Tobey, and Celmins, among other painters. Her recent paintings and drawings, seven of which are currently on view at Feigen–together with five 1991 works in a downstairs office–have simple subjects. But the longer I looked, the more my experience of them deepened. I was led less to identifiable themes, a definitive “vision of the world,” than to a deepening of my own inner awareness.
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In many Renaissance portraits, perspective is used to articulate a relationship of dominance: the wealthy merchant is shown against a window-view of his city, which seems subservient to his controlling gaze. Fish has (as have many of her colleagues) rewritten the power relations inherent in the traditional pairing of figure and ground. Snow and sky are equal but not merged; the viewer can see one and then the other as foreground, and then see them both on the same plane. After several minutes of viewing, the picture presents all three possibilities at once. It is quiet yet alive, still but not static. I felt the “still active equilibrium” Fish says she seeks.
Each of her four Garden drawings on view are black-and-white clusters of diverse biomorphic forms. While Garden #1 has empty space between the shapes, the others are more densely packed; in Garden #23, shapes are superimposed on each other and virtually no white paper is visible. These improvisations on plant shapes are highly suggestive–a garden of the imagination. These drawings are made on paper printed with a grid apparently intended for Japanese calligraphy practice. While the regularity of the grid makes an interesting contrast with the garden shapes, I also thought of the long connection between calligraphy and landscape painting in Japanese and Chinese art. Learning calligraphy was thought to be the beginning of all artistic training, even more than figure drawing was for Western artists; a close examination of older Japanese paintings shows how much the brush strokes owe to calligraphy. The implication is that Fish’s shapes might form a new vocabulary.
