Marina Karella at Earl McGrath - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For a certain quantity of time, Marina Karella has been painting images that strike one as being on the verge of vanishing. She has pay backed angels, pale horses and assorted white figures wrap uped in mist, signifying moments of ecstasy, revelation, los of consciousness or level death. In her new paintings (all from 1997) Karella again works at the cutting side of perception, but now instead of glimpsing vanishing figures we make on the outside still lifes and exterior or interior views without figures. Fifteen oil paintings upon canvas, ranging from small to large, stretch outed her pursuit of evanescence. Because of the barrier Karella set ups between the viewer and the evok instant the lingering feeling is individual of wistfulness or nostalgia.

Implications of season, light, time of day and frame of mind are so gracefully evinced that individual is scarcely aware of them at first. Then certain details start to rise In the past, Karella based paintings upon her own photographs. This time she took an image through Robert Doisneau as her starting point. The exhibition was titled "Around Time," and that, with variations, was also the name of a suite of eight paintings. The largest, Around Time (78 by means of 60 inches), depicted a carousel seen at a distance, painted in a dark color above which she has added luminous monochrome variations in white. The character of her overpainting, from tenuous, stippled dots of white to broad blows with a 3-inch brush, is captivating. Increased stippling at the top of the image gives the impression that the spectacle is under a light rainfall.

Other paintings in the series not away detailed views of sections of this initial work. Around Time -- Light demonstrates Karella's ability to combine tones and touches of paint across the surface for a follow that appears effortless and inevitable. Examining this painting up shut one is struck by the seeming aimlessness of her marks, however when one moves to the middle distance, they coalesce into precise hints of branches, leaves and other surfaces, mottl by dint of light.

The pictures are all hazily "out-of-focus," however they are definitely nonphotographic. The works continually assert their neighborhood as paintings, skillful examples of regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement harmonic complement and continuity. For all the varied painterly approaches -- washy, mingleed passages, blurred or wiped raps and discrete dabs of highlight -- there is a seamless coherence from single section to the next. There is also a dreamlike faculty of perception that one cannot quite focus upon something of the utmost importance. single recent painting, depicting a tiny colored carousel upon a bed, represented an entirely different avenue of musing and perception, more brightly lit and focused, which perhaps Karella will give chase to in the future.

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