Betsy Kaufman at Leslie Tonkonow - Brief Article

Betsy Kaufman's nine modest-size abstract watercolors exploit nuances of color, as individual would expect, but the works also have the linear clarity of drawings and a material nearness more often associated with statuary Two of these works upon paper (all are untitled and dated 1999) share with the larger acrylic-on-canvas paintings for which she's known the irregularly overlapping handmade grids that one time provoked critic Barry Schwabsky to describe them as "the softest hard-edge paintings you could possibly imagine."

on the contrary none of the works shown at Tonkonow have the acrylics' optimistic palette of pastels and light-impregnated tints They are as restrained in color as in size (most are verticals about 24 inches tall). Kaufman uses paper of beautiful shades of ecru cocoa brown pale verdant tan, yellow and black--sere or collected never brilliant--that has an elegant fabric of infinitesimal grooves. The works are as arch as Agnes Martin's and are likewise patterned with faint pencil lines. Kaufman's lines, however, are packed together in a shut up of straight and dense parallels, ragged at the beginning and extremity Set within this graphite rectangle is another, made of watercolor hits that also combines constraint and loosenes This smaller close of fatter lines seems to flap the wings quickly because the lineup is similarly approximate and because Kaufman evacuates her brush: within each thump and from one stroke to the nearest the color varies from opaque to transparent. Sometimes the watercolor knocks and the pencil lines race in the same direction, and sometimes they are perpendicular. In the darkest works, the pencil lines are visible solitary as a sheen. One guesse at their presence

Kaufman's works are not quite square, not quite center upon the page, with elements not quite lined up They look to have been done with the most distant care, yet with sensitivity and tentativeness transforming a rigid preconception. Kaufman allows chance to play a character within the framework she has chosen The works certainly grow out of Minimalism, on the other hand unlike LeWitt's, Judd's or Andre's influential expressions of metal, machining, mathematics or machismo, these are as yielding and slow as an exhaled breath.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group