Tracey Jones at Elizabeth Harris - exhibition of paintings - Brief Article

of recent origin YORK

Exploring the well-trod terrain of gestural abstraction, Tracey Jone nonetheless discovers a certain quantity of fresh pleasures. Using a palette knife, she creates a thick impasto that sometimes spills above to form a crust at the painting's cutting side More spontaneous strokes dance above this curdled surface, creating a counterpoint between stasis and motion While all the paintings tread in the steps of a basic structure, variations in color, form and emphasis make sure that each one addresses a different emotional state.

In the large, playfully named horizontal canvas If Soutine's Chicken Could take wing flashes of orange are interspersed amid colors of deep blue and verdant In addition, rapid marks skitter above the surface like shifting reflections upon water, bringing to mind past interpretations of nature by the agency of Monet and Joan Mitchell.

Exodus provides a different kind of move Mutating from darkness to light, it has a diagonal thrust that put in motions the eye from the bottom left to the top right. The general palette of black, white and gray is shattered up by flecks of orange, r aquamarine, brown and purple creating a crooked sense of internal struggle.

The nursery-rhyme-inspired title of single painting, Blackbird Pie, suggests the possibility of surprises beneath calm surfaces. The work has an overall composition in which pats of yellow, black, white and brown crawl across a heavily textur surface. There is practically no separation of figure and soil By contrast, Asteroid, one of the smaller and livelier works in the exhibit contains knifed lines that work almost like figures.

Breaking without into vibrant color, Garden of Delights is a big orange painting with accents of golden blue-green and black. It has les dramatic internal motion than some of the other works, relying instead upon traces of lines that summon forth the careful delineations of cave painting.

Jones's paintings don't break novel ground or reinvent gestural abstraction. What they do manage, however, is to indicate that there is still a great deal of vitality in established abstract traditions.

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