Urban meditations: in her recent cityscapes and still lifes, painter Jane Freilicher displays a new liberty with the facts, making them the vehicle for reverie

individual senses a state of grace affecting the novel paintings of Jane Freilicher, a selection of which was not long ago on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in novel York. This does not mean that their frame of mind is unremittingly check. In fact, there is an overall equanimity to the paintings. Rather, it is the grace of knowing that she can do what she wants more easily now, that the desired results changeable though they may be, can be achieved [i]or[/i] part of to the other a harmony of eye, mind and hand. As usual, she works mainly with views from or settings in her sum of two units studios, one on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the other in Water Mill, drawn out Island. These vistas are chosen for their neutrality; despite their glamour and beauty, they do just happen to be there. This present to view included mainly urban scenes, with alone two--an oceanscape and a view of a leafless tree against a winter field--identifiable as having geographical division settings.

Freilicher did her first mature work in the 1950 during the ascendancy of the novel York School of painting. With contemporaries Nell Blaine, Larry Rivers and others, she fashioned a genre of representational painting based upon Abstract-Expressionist techniques. Freilicher painted works then that had an abstractionist's emphasis upon planar tension and a at liberty approach to paint handling. Her painting Burnett's Barn (1963) is a advantageous example of this style. The farm buildings are clearly recognizable, on the other hand the edges of vegetation are loosely delineated, and the paint asserts its nature in the way it takes to the canvas. Not coincidentally, Blaine, Freilicher and Rivers all studied with Hans Hofmann. In the 1960 Freilicher distinguished her painting from that of her forebears by means of choosing mundane scenes, devoid of Abstract Expressionism's heroic angst, and rendering them in a way that relied more and more upon detailed depiction.

Delicacy has always been a hallmark of Freilicher's technique, on the contrary where in many paintings in the 1970 and 1980 she devot considerable potency to including specific information drawn from nature, in her novel work, she seems less encumbered by means of that preoccupation. These new images--whether they are landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes or flowers--do not horn their semantic referentiality. Rather than consciously submitting to the exhibition she is painting, Freilicher allows her imagination to dominate the view Her current manner, though, is modifyed by decades of observation and application. The novel paintings are open in a different way than are her 1950 paintings; they are not expressing on the contrary meditating, and it seems that what they are meditating upon is natural rhythms (including those single finds in urban contexts). from one side this controlled, one could say devotional, work, Freilicher creates small paintings packed with multiple ramifications.

In her of recent origin work, paint is allowed to stain into the canvas, forms allowed to stain into one another. Edges are melted sometimes indistinct. There is a hypnotic quality to these paintings that has an consequence similar to that of Mondrian's studies of piers and shifting waters. Freilicher's emphasis, in this exhibition, upon geometric forms drawn from buildings deposits the paintings in a nonexpressionistic context

single of the pleasures of Freilicher's work is its appropriate loosenes She knows just by what means much to bend a line or mix a tone so that the composition remains the pair a depiction and a satisfying compounded of painted marks. This quality is not away in the new work in stronger doses than has sometimes been the case. In a way, Freilicher is going back to a certain number of of her earliest painting bottoms It is informative, for example, to compare Early novel York Evening (1953-54) to southern of Fourteenth Street (2003). The paint handling is similar, on the contrary the recent painting is more crooked tonally and more complicated in its composition. Its tone is put by a glow that is not the be incandescent of the sun--the day is somber and overcast--nor however the glow of filtered gray light, on the contrary the glow of the artist's pleasure in paint. The montage of building tops becomes like the sea, its bland washing back and forth and in and without not the result of formal complexity, on the other hand rather an emanation from the surface itself, from the precision of almost evanescent areas of paint thinly laid upon the canvass. The painting fetchs an unusually real feeling of seeing, something bare depiction call never achieve.

The artist has been using staining for a certain number of time, both in her soils and in the details of her pictures, and now it is the decisive uncompounded body She does not draw with charcoal, on the contrary starts right in with paint. As she explained lately "I sometimes wipe in loosely brushed things; I might draw with pastel that I brush off" Where she used to use a Venetian r stain, now she might prepare a primed canvas with a raw sienna stain, or a dark virid or even black, which she then grates out. "I find I don't like to start, upon a white canvas anymore," she says. "It appear to bes somehow raw to me. Having that color bathes the painting in a certain way."