Jane Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy - Brief Article

The forms in Jane Freilicher's paintings flutter at the brink of intangibility. Color put a wrapper abouts objects in a haze of whispered intensities that vibrate against individual another, reminiscent of Rothko. Dangerously delicate to the point of lacking ballast, her fuzzy forms sometimes appear to be too wispy, as if the dusted pigment of which they are made might easily stroke away. Her vases of flowers do not invoke the mysticism of Redon, nor do her landscapes achieve the intense shimmer of Monet's, on the other hand at her best, Freilicher can coax color to a piercing romanticism.

Freilicher has been showing actively in fresh York since the early 1950 Dividing her time between studios in Greenwich Village and upon Long Island, she has been evenhandedly engaged with still life and landscape as well as with an amalgamation of the sum of two units in which vases of flowers are placed before a cityscape or a natural vista.

The greatest in quantity successful of the landscape/still-life hybrids in this present to view was a pastel on linen, Cosmo (1998) a sweet, effervescent drawing of pink and r flowers in a glass vase place against a green field. Also in this genre Marigolds II (2000) demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the interactions of colors and fabrics but the painting tends to separate into distinct baldrics of figure and ground.

In the beautiful Overcast (1999) an oblong landscape of for the most part pale violet water and celestial expanse Freilicher makes palpable the weight and squeezing of fog against various subdu virids In another landscape, September instant (1999), she endows a young tree with the kind of singular nearness found in the flora of Henri Rousseau.

The hallmark painting of the present to view the large landscape Goldenrod Variations (2000) has the scale and freshnes of a view end a picture window. We gaze out to an immense field of lemon fulvid flowers and beyond to a narrow band of water, an flat narrower strip of landscape and, finally, a lazy-looking heavens The foreground's cool white and bluish-green yields to the high heat of the middle turf Freilicher loves yellow as van Gogh did, and we perceive the exuberant rush and magnitude of a single color taken to uttermosts relaxed and then pushed again.

Freilicher's work nears us with a rare intimacy and an understated formality. She is generous toward the world, painting flowers as if they were family portraits. Indeed, encircleed by her paintings, one have feelings on familial terms with nature.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group