Susan Smolinski at Edge

Thirteen modest-size paintings, mixed-medium upon wood panel, and two wall paintings center upon excerpts from the artist's have a title to writings, made up Susan Smolinski's exhibition, which she titled "Night Mirror." It was dimly lit and occupied the lowering back space of the gallery.

Although all was not grim--Starlight/Electric, for single gracefully recalls Whistler's "Rocket" paintings in its dark atmosphere discharge full of stars--the general tenor of the exhibit was tense and brooding. The several paintings titled Night canopy of heaven are swatches of impenetrable black texturing. greatest in quantity of the more representational works depict individual or two masklike heads with their craniums remov seemingly inviting us to direct the eye into them and poke [i]or[/i] part of to the other their memories or emotions. In any reading, the interpersonal implications are not particularly happy ones

Add to this that in all of the paintings, marks made by the agency of scratching and gouging into the grove panels create an elevated faculty of perception of anxiety, as well as frequently suggesting incoherent, illegible writing. In In Black Liquid, the sgraffito technique call ups an aura around a head, like a visualization of a migraine or the electrical charge of panic. upon this 24-by-16-inch panel, the head is forced toward the bottom cutting side and framed in curving streaks of painted light that might show hands raised protectively or might indicate that the head is spinning. The finer scratched lines spill without of the cranium. There is more light toward the top of this almost monochrome work (ranging from black to gray-blue to white, with a scarcely any blots of red within the head), including a shape that might be the base and bases of a tree, but it present the appearances brutal rather than comforting. the two the images and the abused surfaces fetch a sense of inchoate emotion and inarticulate sensation.

Nevertheless, it is not inconsistent that the roughly 6-by-4-foot wall paintings involved a apportionment of words--two numbered stanzas implying the existence of more. The body s make word pictures, evoking, for example, a painting decomposing into a statuary of Styrofoam, asbestos and shattered glass. The white letters were divide [i]or[/i] sever through a blue-gray cloud of paint into a layer of joint combine slathered onto the wall. They were scratched in, and then scratched out--nearly obliterated. Words were also carved directly into the impressible joint compound, white on white and no easier to read. The solitary proces of recording, like the act of a prisoner, is more important here than the particular words. Smolinski, 27 has been exhibiting since 1992; her writing began with a journal she kept while confined to a psychiatric ward as a teenager.

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