Burt Hansen and Frances Tint at Hugo de Pagano - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Burt Hasen and Francine Tint, sum of two units veteran New York abstract painters, showed concurrently in separate on the other hand adjoining rooms. The two assemblages of paintings at first have the appearanceed unrelated, but some unexpected meetings emerged. The artists share certain formal touchs as well as thematic interests. Each presents a more or less centralized composition in which gestural markings and fly opens of color activate the surfaces with a kind of centrifugal force. Thematically, the couple artists explore dichotomies -- microcosm and macrocosm, order and chaos.

Hasen, who studied with Hans Hofmann and has been showing since the '50 is known for compositions featuring networks of energetic black squiggly lines and small, vibrantly colored organic and geometric forms plant against misty backgrounds of mut earth tones. In novel works the shapes are usually tightly bunched together, encompassed by largely uninflected areas of color. The forms have the appearance to move agitatedly toward the center of each composition. Among the seven works here, the large (70-by-100-inch) diptych Explosion-Fixe remind ofs a macrocosmic vision. Covering the surface with a sand-colored sod Hasen disrupts the field with misty patches of charcoal gray, like explosions in a waste battlefield seen from an airplane. The beige field of Overflight Aerial -- Map is divided in half by means of small rectangular shapes and white ribbons outlined in black. In addition to the implications of its title, the work call forths organisms writhing under a microscope.

Tint's paintings also summon ambiguous spaces. The artist, whose works were championed by means of Clement Greenberg and who has shown widely with artists of the like kind as Olitski and Poons, uses pouring, staining and scraping techniques in each of the four canvases upon view. Big Thunder (70 by means of 100 inches) shows a gray expanse activated by the agency of an allover pattern of hazy, circular scrawls in ocher, like dissipating alphabetic characters written by a skywriter in a storm. In Daughters of Wisdom, the artist slathers onto the center of the canvas a thick layer of iridescent gold paint atop background washes of of great depth magenta and pink. Sgraffito lines forcefully etched near the bottom of the canvas strike one as being to designate the foreground, on the other hand Tint stops short of defining the space. The emphasis in this luminous work is upon the sensual properties of color and surface.

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