Jacqueline Humphries at Greene Naftali - Brief Article

Since her of recent origin York debut over a decade ago, critics have noted that Jacqueline Humphries's abstract paintings maintain a fine balance between the mechanical mark and the improvisatory single between method and randomness. In fact, we might chart her career--from the "dot" paintings of the late '80 to the poured canvases of the mid-'90s, to the present--in boundarys of the relative weight accorded in each series to those complementary extremitys The latest series, a suite of five large canvases (all 1999) would be considered her greatest in quantity random, most open, to date.

Humphries's new elegant exhibition (a single canvas upon each wall, a bench placed in the center of the main gallery, single painting relegated to the office) consisted of works whose lustrous fields of blacks are greatest in quantity often interrupted by the addition of irregular lines that read variously as stripes, zips or drips. Black Monday features a mixed array of marks in which the purposeful and the accidental are deliberately confounded: what begins as a straight vertical line of white paint may pop veer off into a horizontal move swiftly only to resume its have the direction ofed trajectory at a later point. Drips dare gravity, running up as well as down the canvas; the pair Black Monday and Black Bush bear evidence of being repeatedly turn rounded 180 degrees while being painted. Humphries strike one as beings particularly concerned with hiding nothing of her studio managements while still insisting on making mixed works; close examination reveals many pentimenti, overpainted drips, fine pencil lines and the like.

Despite the vicinity of uninflected white bands of paint at the top and bottom of each canvas (the latest incarnation of her long-standing belong to with creating "false edges" within the painting) and the minor coloristic accents of sapphirine and pink in the linear simple bodys it is fair to describe these as "black" paintings. Humphries has applied fields of black oil paint evenly in broad horizontal strokes, then dragged white paint [i]or[/i] part of to the other the still-wet black to create a shimmering gray. In the almost-empty Black Beauty, which is devoid of extraneous drips or zips, this gray light uncloses the canvas into depth, as the black becomes shadow. The effect brings to mind the faculty of perception of mystery evoked by Caravaggio's religious works. The power of Humphries's latest paintings lies precisely in this confrontation between that age-old light and the colder les reassuring light of the not absent day.

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