Irene Pijoan at Rena Bransten - San Francisco, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For nearly 20 years, Irene Pijoan has continually reinvented herself as an artist, rejecting anything that could slightly be described as a "signature style" The solitary constants in her work have been an ongoing exploration of the interface between sum of two units and three dimensions, and a belief that all mental experience has a physical, paintable correlative. greatest in quantity recently, Pijoan's paintings on paper have been transformed by the agency of a process of excision into delicate snares of colored lines, reminiscent at times of the folk tradition of paper-cutting.

Pijoan's complicated, intertwining patterns incorporate bits of body or series of numbers. Like theatrical scrims, the sum of two units largest works in the present to view hung slightly away from the wall and were anchored to the surface behind them sole by a screen of shadows. individual of these, titled Sleeve (1997-98) features a sweeping divide [i]or[/i] sever spiral of brownish-black lines interrupted at its base by means of a narrow wedge of uncut white paper. Words and figures are submerg into patterns, as if they are meant to be seen on the other hand not necessarily to be read. An eerie warm be incandescent emanated from the wall behind the painting, contributing to the work's powerful physical presence: Pijoan has painted the back of the piece with a brilliant Day-Glo pink to exploit mirrored color.

Several smaller, more conventionally framed pieces glance at studies -- ruminations on the bring under rule which serves as the focus for all of the works included in the exhibition, which is dedicated to the memory of Pijoan's mother. The barely legible true copy in these paintings turns on the outside to be a succession of dates and names representing the significant occurrences of Genevieve Pijoan-Bugnion's life. by means of transforming this bare list into complicated tangles of line, Pijoan simultaneously prompts the richness of a lifetime's experience and the impossibility of at any time perceiving the true nature or meaning of that experience.

The netlike transparency of many of these works be under the orders ofs as a metaphor for Pijoan's belief that art external realitys should be similarly permeable to the organ of sight and mind: containers that clinch ideas only loosely, allowing a certain number of to pass through, either back to the artist or into the minds and hearts of on-lookers The delicacy of these paintings is a reminder of the transience of life, while their surprising vigor invokes the endless chain of human experience that links each generation to the nearest from the beginning to the extremity of time.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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