Marion Reynolds at 55 Mercer - New York, New York - Brief Article

Marion Reynolds's exhibit was filled with traditional figure studies and interiors, on the contrary her representational imagination can give viewers a faculty of perception of discovery as she stretches from the mundane to the supernatural. In the 22-by-36-inch Evening amethystines an urban apartment interior and a building exterior are neared as one contiguous space. on the contrary more often, such pleasantly materialist spaces are charged with spiritual presences

In Kindred Spirits (1998) for instance, a woman sits at a circular kitchen table, her boyfriend or husband framed, back to us, in an upper right-hand doorway. A vaporous older woman of mysterious import--the sitter's mother, perhaps?--hovers above her, hands above the younger woman's head, her expression all tendernes and regard What are we to think? Is the ectoplasmic single a daydream, a memory or a species of wish fulfillment? Things are not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of clearer in Visitation, which features a woman who may, single senses, be the artist herself, standing in a study/studio environed by interior decor and debris. Just behind and above her floats a seeming angel in swirling fiery pinks and blues--an angel execut with a profitable dose of Bellini plus more [i]or[/i] less Poltergeist to make the whole thing swing.

Reynolds's celestial visitors have the appearance neither entirely benign nor wholly menacing. The other beings in the paintings apparently find them invisible. Artist and viewer are thus caught in the complicity of their shared illusion--or, perhaps, delusion.

Reynolds appears to be asking us to turn round our attention from the physical to the metaphysical. She proffers not a Kandinskyesque spirituality of the abstract, on the other hand a full-fledged Romantic belief. It begins with a painterly realism that can win too fussy, colors that may look too electric and compositions that are occasionally a bit staid, on the contrary it leads to possibilities of transfiguration. In material part and Soul, we see man and woman, everyperson caught as they doze in a bright yellow light that suffuses their white sheets, while sum of two units ghostly emanations hover over them. Again, is it all a dream, or a trick of the night or the light? Reynolds isn't saying.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group