88
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
his works on paper, Fonseca gives free rein to his delicate touch, his
ability to invent (or discover) the free -wheeling, animated shapes that float
across and in the superimposed layers of color, employing a vocabulary of
tight drawing-gestures that seems perfectly appropriate to the intimate
scale of paper; the smallest, most meticulous marks function like orna–
mentation in Baroque performance. On a larger scale, on canvas, these tiny
gestures risk seeming precious. To my eye, Fonseca's best recent paintings
were not only the loosest and apparently least calculated, but the ones with
the largest shape-protagonists. A couple of mid-sized canvases, one with
an irresistible Pompeiian red expanse, the other a delectable brown-black,
both with slightly slapdash, generously scaled "escapes" from underneath,
were among the strongest of the new works.
Fonseca is young, gifted, and blessed (or cursed) with the visual equiv–
alent of perfect pi tch - an abili ty to create refined, beautifully resolved,
harmonious images. The best canvases in his recent show suggested that
he is also capable of exploring an invigorating dissonance, and I hope he
continues to do so.
Undoing Geometry
was a provocative group show organized by Michael
Chisholm for the Shirley Fitterman Gallery at CUNY's Borough of
Manhattan Community College. Chisholm's choices, Frances Barth,
Robin Bruch, John Greer,
Jill
Nathanson, and Rodney White, work in
very different ways, from Barth's formidable explorations of flat expanse
and spatial allusion, to Greer's updates of a high-chroma geometry I asso–
ciate with the 1960s. What unites them is the not always peaceful
coexistence in their paintings of rational, geometric notions of order, and
of reliance on intuition, even of narrative aspirations.
In
Barth's fusions of
geology, mapping, and abstractness or Nathanson's meditations on expres–
sive, elemental opposi tions of color, touch, and edge, the tension between
conflicting elements is enriching and meaningfi.!l. This obtains, also, in
Bruch's warped grids, with their complex color rhymes and syncopated
rhythms, particularly when the irregular divisions are large enough to
allow surface, as well as hue, to come into play. This tension is less appar–
ent, alas, in White's modish oppositions of appropriated images and
geometric overlay, but as a whole
Undoing Geometry
provided further
assurance that thoughtful, felt abstract painting is alive and healthy.
Two not-to-be-missed shows of the past season,
Max Beckmann in
Exile,
at the downtown Guggenheim, and
III the L(eht
if
Italy: Corot and Early
Open-Air Painting,
at the Brooklyn Museum, occupied opposite ends of the
emotional and formal spectrum. The Guggenheim exhibition brought
together the most ambitious, key works of Beckmann's last decades, when
excoriated by the Nazis as a decadent artist, forbidden to teach or exhibit,
he fled Germany for Amsterdam and, eventually, the United States. The
