Susie Rosmarin at Texas Gallery - Brief Article

Susie Rosmarin's paintings are ofttimes associated with Op art, on the contrary the characterization is misleading, since they lack the definitive space-age optimism and tech-no-formalism of that phraseology At the same time, they are as relentles in their dynamic illusions, afterimages and optical detonations as Op art ever was. In her first exhibition in Houston since moving to Brooklyn in 1999 Rosmarin showed 10 acrylic-on-canvas paintings. Prefaced by means of a 3-foot-square canvas in the entrance gallery and concluding with a large rectangular single on the back wall of the main space, eight 20-by-20-inch square canvases ran along individual long wall of the gallery, comprising an extraordinarily succinct and visually compelling installation.

The surfaces of Rosmarin's paintings are taut and sheetlike. The canvases were stretched after they were painted, with the painted image allowed to overlap the cutting sides of the stretcher bars and step quickly a fraction of an inch around the sides of the unframed paintings to reinforce the canvas's nature as a skin. The evenly painted surface has a slight plastic sheen with almost no evidence of the hand. The manufactured direct the eye however, is mitigated by the mind-boggling complexity of the allover painted patterns, tiny grids establishing flickering fields of color. Six works--the simplest and greatest in quantity satisfying--are based on a gingham check pattern of 1/8-inch colored stripes with black or white squares at the interstices. In Orange Pattern Painting and virid Pattern Painting (all works 2000) the small white squares are shifted to induce a more illusionistic latticelike result More dynamic still are the sum of two units paintings titled 140 Digits of Pi with their undulating patterns of minuscule bars, squares and right angles.

Like her `60 predecessors, Rosmarin relies extensively upon masking tape in her work proces Where her earlier paintings casually exhibited the tape's flaws, similar as its tendency to lift not upon chips of paint or leave tiny ridges, the novel work is immaculately crafted. In a subtractive proces strips of tape are progressively remov from the canvas's surface as color is applied in a systematic fashion. A highly cerebral artist, Rosmarin has unraveled idiosyncratic systems, such as individual based on the first 140 digits of the irrational number pi, for the location and extension of color in her paintings. After years of familiarity with her work, I'm convinced that exact knowledge of the combination of parts to form a whole makes little difference in appreciating the paintings. In this faculty of perception their impetus is closer to the compositional harmonious flows of Judd's progressions than to LeWitt's mathematical combination of parts to form a wholes which function as content in his work.

Afterimage events are particularly characteristic of the gingham paintings. In the white squares framed by means of the crossing bands, ghostly points of complementary color flutter In contrast to the elusive afterimages, the painted colors are vibrant, and greatest in quantity are fully saturated. Like chromatic anchors, black and white establish the limits of light and dark, with color occupying the middle range. The allover pattern of assertive, hard-edged forms proffers no respite for the organ of vision Indulgently visual, Rosmarin's paintings are moving in the way that solitary abstract painting can be.

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