Jenny Hankwitz at Cheryl Pelavin - showing of paintings

In Jenny Hankwitz's riotous large-scale paintings, flat vivid colors and explosive splash patterns border and swirl, slipping giddily toward the cutting sides as if daring the canvas to contain them. Many of the 14 oil paintings in her third solo display in New York were painted during a sojourn in fresh Mexico, a landscape that has inspired artists as diverse as Georgia O'Keeffe and Krazy Kat creator George Herriman.

Blasting heated Day and Cool Starry Night, each 90 through 42 inches, play off the uttermosts of the desert in their use of color. In the former, a bright sky-colored field is obscured by a boldly outlined white shape that could be a hybrid of fan blades and cartoon bunny ears; this is obscur in turn round by beige splots and orange splats, as if someone had dropp paint-filled balloons upon the canvas. The white shape present to views up again in the latter, now against a dark background and festooned with a swirling hit and pastel blue and golden splats.

The seemingly wild abandon of the splash patterns might give an inkling of that these compositions are hanging upon random occurrences, until single notices that, like the white shape, suspiciously similar forms come back in several paintings. The work Fearless, for instance, has verdant blue and gray splashes moving in from separate corners. The contours of the gray shape are repeated in Slip, solitary now it is blue, with contrasting black, white and r splats against pink.

These returns are rooted in Hankwitz's proces which begins at the computer where scans of brushstrokes and ink spills are worked into compositions that are then transferred to canvas. She does not come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind the design by rote, as revealed by the agency of the pentimenti of alterations made during the painting proces A selection of watercolors and prints, also upon view, made it clear that she also works quite handily with direct processe and a more mut palette. Any artist working with flat colors and cartoonish imagery is inevitably compared to Roy Lichtenstein--in this instance, his later brushstroke paintings leap to mind--but the works upon paper bear equal comparison to Brice Marden's calligraphic drawings.

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