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PARTISAN REVIEW
paper whose landscape mood seemed determined more by qualities of
light and color than by allusion. Occasionally leaf-like or branch-like
shapes declared themselves, but these references usually seemed more
like homages to Matisse than descriptions of things seen. A loose-limbed
geometry dominated. Meyer's large paintings have increasingly shared
the improvisatory, calligraphic qualities of her paperworks; witness her
recent show, in which her radiant, generously scaled canvases seemed as
casual and direct as any of her watercolors.
Meyer constructs her pictures as off-hand checkerboards of rapidly
brushed squares. Each zone has its own density and hue, so that her
most engaging pictures seem to happen as you look: a vigorous twist of
the brush here, a series of swirls there, a sweep of blue over
here
and an
answering patch of warm brown in the next column. Overscaled strokes
collide or mesh, depending on their degree of transparency. When they
overlap, colors shift and visual weight is increased, simultaneously
detaching the roughly rectangular zones of paint from reference and
reinforcing their character as distinct entities. These islands of height–
ened density of material and hue are important. They throw things off
in a helpful way, counteracting the risk, in the largest pictures, of uni–
form transparency's becoming mere thinness or of underlying's geome–
try's becoming rigid.
In
the end, it's Meyer's light-drenched color that determines the impact
of her paintings and locates them most securely in the natural world. At
Elizabeth Harris, she explored a range of sun-struck, transparent yellows
and ochres, and a gamut of greens as various as the colors of newly
emerging leaves. (In this context, it was impossible not to read other
chromatic colors as floral notes, which paradoxically made more visible
Meyer's ultimate independence from nature and her debt to other art,
especially to Matisse.)
In
the last few years, Meyer has increasingly pared
down her images, as though trying to discover just how economically she
could evoke a sense of the out-oF-doors. The spare, energetic paintings in
her recent show made me eager to see what she does next.
The debut? Jilaine Jones's bold, take-no-prisoners constructions at
Salander-O'Reilly. Jones is the real thing: a sculptor who uses a rich
material palette-plaster, wood, steel, string, and more-to explore
three-dimensionality by dissecting, displacing, and reconfiguring chunks
of air. The drama of her work depends on how things touch or the
simultaneous likeness and unlikeness of a slender, round metal bar and
a slab of weathered wood, the contrast of a suavely curved plaster vol–
ume and a curved charcoal line drawn across a flat plaster plane.
