Language and Intuition

A 25-year observe reveals that, when her work gained attention as part of the "New Image Painting" in the late '7O Denise virid was actually moving against the representational incline toward abstraction.

Denise Green's art first gained attention when it was included along with paintings through artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Neil Jenney and Susan Rothenberg in the exhibition "New Image Painting" at the Whitney Museum in 1978 She exhibited her work regularly at novel York galleries in the late 1970 [i]or[/i] part of to the other the '80s. In the past decade, however, greatest in quantity of her shows have been in Europe or her native region Australia. Now a retrospective of paintings and works upon paper, traveling in the U proffers a chance to see what verdant has been doing and in what way her art looks as a whole.

The exhibition's first stop was at P 1 Contemporary Art Center in lengthy Island City. It occupied four small ranges on the ground floor of the extensive exhibition compounded and was a slightly edited version of the larger traveling display Nonetheless, among the cacophony of installations and performance works and the barrage of wall-to-wall art completely through the rest of the building, these four extents were a kind of oasis. The simple, sparsely hung galleries provided for the quiet, contemplative experience of looking at paintings. And despite the small number of works (18 oils and 8 works upon paper) selected to represent shut up to 25 years of art-making, the display provided lots to see and think about.

The advantage of a retrospective is the opportunity it presents to consider the individual artist's unfolding slightly removed from the influences of others. In the case of virid for example, it becomes clear that despite her association with the get back to image-making in the '70 she was actually headed against that incline and toward abstraction. Her earlier paintings (not included in this show) were cityscapes that have affinities with works by means of Edward Hopper. The '70s oils are already somewhat abstract, involving the isolation of things in an allover monochromatic field of tertiary color. Seven of these "New Image" paintings form the core of her in every one's mouth show. Each is a square canvas with individual or two silhouetted images--a chair, utensil fan, bridge or a trap that direct the eyes something like a house--in a noncontextualized space. In several, the remnants of an overall grid are proposeed by regularly spaced lines, points or crosse In the '80 the paintings became more abstract. Her configurations were les recognizable as images and more readily defined as geometric shapes, calligraphic markings or signs, all situated in nebulous parti-color fields. freshly she has reclaimed her earlier images, reintroducing generalized shapes of utensils fans, houses and chairs together with geometric uncompounded bodys all floating in softer fields of color that imply space.

Almost all the paintings in the exhibition are square, many are black and white, and greatest in quantity incorporate images in some way. Generally speaking, Green's paintings swing between sum of two units esthetic poles: one analytic, accentuating image, conception and structure; the other intuitive, stressing color, gesturing and decoration. Duane Triangle (1988) a heavily textur intensely colored verdant red and black painting with boldly drawn, squiggled lines, was the exhibition's one representative of the wildly decorative color and wholly nonreferential markings verdant sometimes uses. This survey favors the analytic characteristics in its emphasis upon the development of her image-making. The "New Image" paintings plant the tone and present themselves as a kind of reservoir of motifs and concerns

Like many of her contemporaries in the early '70 verdant was interested in theories of semiology and incorporated her cogitations about the visual language of signs in her work. The simplified, silhouetted shapes of her "New Image" paintings are center upon flat, square grounds; they recall the design of international types conveying information (presaging the more rigorous combination of parts to form a wholes of Matt Mullican).

The meaning of Green's images and marks changes above time, but remains inherently ambiguous. In Summer Heat (1981) for example, she introduces calligraphic marks that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to letters or mathematical symbols, thereby referring to written language. on the contrary though she proposes the idea of signs and language, she does not proffer much possibility of specific interpretation. by means of altering the context of her signs she modifies their implications. Crosse that gaze like the intersections of a grid in a painting like as For All and None (1978) read as plus signs when isolated and floating upon a field. Similarly, the fan shape that appears in the early paintings gazes like a geometric element--a quadrant of a circle--when placed within a square and inclined upon its side, as in Duane Triangle. Here, the calligraphic markings direct the eye more like random doodles-signs for intuitive gesture--than parts of words or mathematical equations. The more novel Be Careful, She Dreams (1997) combines several images and more [i]or[/i] less abstract marks in an oneiric space. through tilting the house, elongating the leg of the chair and multiplying the utensil (one red and two white ones) virid gives a sense of life to her tokens as though they were characters in a strange animated film.