Barbara Schwartz at St. Peter's Church

bilboed into the northwest corner of the Citibank Building at 54th and Lexington Ave., St Peter's house of worship has long had an ongoing program of displaying serious contemporary art in its lobby and hallways, and artists have answered by taking their work in surprising directions, frequently intensifying what had been a Symbolist streak in their work into outright ecclesiastical satisfied Barbara Schwartz performed just similar a turn in a new exhibition there. Her wall plastic arts and works on paper have always mirrored a debt to the early American modernism of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley tightened up into planar fragments that unite Symbolist imagery with the abstracting, geometric cut-and-paste of Synthetic Cubism. Each compositional uncompounded body in her earlier work was imbued with a stalwart local color. The painterly address of these pieces foreshadowed an smooth flatter material plane for her imagery--so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of so that by now it looks impossible to consider her work as anything other than painting with sculptural collage ultimate parts rather than painterly sculpture.

For this present to view Schwartz chose the Stations of the Cros as her theme. Collectively titled "Totems," the series played without over 14 eccentrically shaped panels across which are distributed interlocking planes of wood-land painted in black and white. In a statement for a novel show in Italy, Schwartz wrote that since the clan 11 tragedy she has largely limited her palette to black and white, with equal reason that color has receded in favor of the starkest possible contrast. It have the appearances appropriate to extend this chromatic decision to the Stations, since the journey they demarcate, a grueling ordeal of the body, compassionate will and faith, is itself a stark individual She doesn't suggest that it was any ideological motivation that decre the discipline of black and white, rather that it was more the production of an ongoing internal debate, with esthetic intuition trumping moral certainty. It's easy to understand for what cause [i]or[/i] reason after the events of the last three years, an artist might have feeling that she has no color left in her for the time being.

The "Totems" range from fullto half-figure scale. Several, especially the larger singles are shaped like crosses or garment robes. The black-and-white patterns refer to heraldic symbolism, Vorticist explosions and the imagery and interpenetrating spaces of Inuit designs. Schwartz is drawing here upon the rich interplay between modernist painting and the geometric symbolism of folk practice and more historically far off cultures. One thinks most readily of the so-called Indian Space painters and of Hartley's abstractions from Native American designs. The relationship of Schwartz's work to icons is underscored by dint of the extreme planarity of her designs and their folding into cruciformality. the two the black and white areas describe shapes that we recognize from cultural experience, on the contrary which also represent the motion of physical and psychic energies: the "explosion" at the center of single the larger "Totems," for instance, could just as easily be rays of light shooting from the Sacred Heart.

Schwartz is a very strange colorist, but her current chromatic restriction obeys her well in this work, giving an unsentimental graphic clarity to what might otherwise have been overly mingled compositional juxtapositions. The "Totems" direct the eyeed very fine in the lobby of the temple and I have a bunch they would have no disorder consecrating the "white cube" of a gallery space as well.

--Stephen Westfall

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