CMYK, Jun 9 – Jul 9, 2006

If there is such a thing as an optimistic pessimism this show embodies it. This show shouts the kind of love for painting that comes after the first flush of discovery is over and the dishes are starting to pile up.

Rochelle Feinstein is a painter with interests outside of the nuts and bolts of painting. Her work deals with the tinny glamour of disco music, Barry White and the cold truth that painting is an outmoded leftover from another era of image making. With panache and gobs of unmixed color Feinstein unleashes a roiling abstract canvas, which only after long inspection reveals a box or room space. Upon further inspection, the abstract potatoes begin to take the form of spots cast from an offstage disco light. It is a mysterious tableau where we feel the complex longing that say a Manet painting evinces.

Matt Connors makes paintings of a distinctively American variety. They somehow manage to pay respectful homage to such seminal American modernists as Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley, while displaying an honest declaration of appreciation for Marimeko fabrics and Roger Vadim movies. The overall effect is levity in the face of sadness; the highest plane an artist can live on, bittersweet.

Monica Moran, makes suitably touchy dyspeptic paintings riffing loosely on utopian minimalism. Daniel Buren, Sol Lewit, and Frank Stella are all skewered and in ways surpassed by Moran’s paintings. There is a lusciousness and candor in these classically difficult abstractions. We feel the painter enjoying herself in spite of the angry screed she set out to accomplish.

Wallace Whitney, June 2006

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