NEW YORK: Andrea Belag at Bill Maynes - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Andrea Belag's of recent origin paintings are her most abstract in years, on the contrary the lived-in world is publicly evoked by their fluidly applied bands of color that increase the depth of in contrast as layers of paint are laid across the surfaces. In many of her paintings this proces builds her imagery into chunky grids that reverberation post-and-lintel architecture (notably present in the Maynes gallery space itself). The light is crepuscular; the viewer can easily imagine looking without at sundown from a loft window. The spatial crowding issueed by the wideness of her bands and her regulated masses of light and dark bring outs the feeling of urban successions of pressure and release.

Because the light in Belag's paintings appear to bes to come largely from behind or underneath her semi-transparent bands of color, there is also a faculty of perception of the light of the cinema. plane the semi-gloss smoothness of the dried paint indicates colored gels and film emulsions. Noir (1997-98) is perhaps the painting that greatest in quantity emphatically conjoins the associations of landscape seen from one side a window and the light and materiality of film. The dark, blue-gray verticals upon either side of the picture billow like drapery at the bottom of the canvas, framing the horizontal bands that allude to a sunset over water. If the painting's title lock openers a recognition of the filmic quality of the light and the cropp space of the picture, other titles give in charge to the presence of water: River, Harbor and Rain (all 1998) We are reminded that novel York, where Belag resides, is the one and the other a seaport and a river town. In either direction, east or west, the view end the city's architectural canyons lands us in light upon a river. With these paintings, Belag could be inaugurating a material substance of geometric abstraction as firmly tied to place as Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" series.

The comparison to Diebenkorn is not idle. Belag is individual of a handful of younger midcareer artists who are making abstract paintings that draw from the pair the life-world and the entire history of painting (it was Bellini, after all, who made the great series of portraits with landscape peeking without from behind the figure framed by dint of dark, massively proportioned window ledges) That Belag has mov between abstraction and a poetic, almost folkloric representation while maintaining and developing a characteristic faculty of perception of color and gestural scale refer tos that she is after something more than a "reading" of painting and place. For Belag, in this breakout present to view the interaction between painting and place is nurturing a tone-rich temperament.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group