Peggy Cyphers at Donahue/Sosinski - paintings - Brief Article

Silkscreened, photo-based images of women and insects labor for as backdrops for more spontaneous calligraphic marks and organic shapes in Peggy Cyphers's novel densely layered paintings. Despite their apparent incompatibility, these diverse stamps of imagery less coexist than meld joining in the construction of a world which have the appearances in a constant state of flux

This faculty of perception of movement and life takes Cyphers far from the territory of her early paintings, where the organic and inorganic worlds were carefully segregated into separate compartments at the top and bottom of the paintings. Now various kinds of marks, materials and regards collide in a single plane. Painted, sand-encrusted coiling lines and chains cling to the surface like ancient petroglyph Sweeping black ink thumps bleed into the canvas, suggesting new graffiti scrawled on scarred stones or old walls. Translucent veils of color pass above and under the sand images. Orbs float in ambiguous space while traces of silkscreen images rise ghostlike, from behind the other markings.

Within this general format, Cyphers introduces a number of variations. In Stick Insect, the largest painting here, colors are mut and individual has the sense of lines being formed and quickly obliterated. The underlying image of a neatly coifed, '50s-era woman, is barely visible beneath calligraphic lines and leaflike shapes. The work radiates a faculty of perception of change and organic growth

male honey-bee Zone has much less air--the entire earth seems coated with a thin layer of sand and the overall palette of brutish browns and yellows is interrupted by means of flashes of color and spills of shiny resin. A sea-blue tendril in the center opens like an atomic trail or a sprouting plant. Overall, the painting has an archeological have feeling full of pictographic outlines which have been obscur by means of other more abstract markings laid upon top of them.

Panzy, meanwhile, has a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more vivid colors. One can glimpse orange butterflies and millers silkscreened on a peach turf Orange and red circles prompt sand dollars or flowers. by means of contrast, Future Byzantium is a small dark painting with a swath of pitch-black-painted sand sweeping across its lower half. The swath is les a line or mark than a corrosive spill sinking reaching far down into the canvas.

In these paintings, Cyphers manages to clinch together a dizzying variety of marks and representational methods They are full of explosive potency in which any individual simple body is subsumed beneath the larger faculty of perception of barely controlled chaos.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group