Gina Werfel at Prince Street

above the past two decades, Gina Werfel has unfolded a way of painting that tantalizingly walks the line between landscape and abstraction. In new works from 2002-03, the scale of her marks makes them difficult to interpret as simple bodys of a coherent view. Werfel oftentimes uses brushes an inch or more wide, making pointless marks that loosely articulate the contours of her controls While the scenes may be read from afar, up shut up the paramount impression is of individual brushstrokes. flat from far away, the marks assert themselves as separate from individual another.

In this exhibition, the horizontal canvases take care ofed to be more legible as landscapes, while the verticals functioned more as abstractions. This has partly to do with the fact that the verticals appear to be made at closer vantage points. Whether, as their titles put in mind of the vertical views are of a garden, an arboretum, a cascade or reflections, they have the appearance to indicate the effects of light upon variegated surfaces and colors, while horizontal pieces like Pink House, English Hills and Bone's Farm (all 2002) make use of lengthy views that maintain the recognizability of natural and man-made structures

Lobster beat (2002) is a deft depiction of reflections in water and the forms composing the sides of small dwellings. The viewer, simultaneously reading the image as a conventional exhibition and a disorienting conglomeration of knocks is placed in a situation that is at one time intelligible and unfamiliar. In like works, Werfel's technique most alluringly captures the particularity of the places she depicts, whether they be in Maine or in the Southwest, sum of two units regions in which she has worked above the years.

Werfel's colors are ofttimes muted, and there is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of tonal subtlety within her surging thumps Because her marks can overspread broad swaths of depicted areas, she does not ne to fuss with intricacies of observ web and color; the relationships in which she is interested are those within the painting, not the landscape. Her works wait on to be in the 2-by-3-foot range; single wonders what would happen to Werfel's perceptual experiment if she upp the sizes of her canvases. She might find a certain number of surprising results.

--Vincent Katz

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