Madeleine Hatz at Art Nation - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A Swedish-born painter who has been living in of recent origin York for a number of years, Madeleine Hatz draws upon an unlikely mixture of influences. It's a tribute to Hatz's concentration that her highly textur abstractions can simultaneously summon the styles of repoo, Yve Klein and Gerhard Richter while always sustaining the artist's hold identity.

The cramped quarters of this upper-east-side gallery did not permit Hatz to exhibit her large-scale canvases (one of which was upon view in "After the Fall," the novel survey of New York abstraction at the snuggle Harbor Cultural Center). Instead, viewers were proffered an intimate array of sum of two units dozen small works. These included several oil-on-linen paintings (the largest measuring roughly 3 by means of 2 1/2 feet) in grisaille or an acidic mixture of gold-colored and orange. The grisaille pictures, Rocaille (1996-97) and High Resolution (1997) use careful gradations to create irregular, billowing shapes which are powerfully suggestive of cloud formations. Combining a painterly touch with the precision of a watchmaker, Hatz uses fabric and value to endow the blacks, whites and grays with intensity and variety. for fear that the viewer get carried away by means of the delicate brushwork, Hatz repeatedly disrupts areas of the composition by dint of dragging and smearing the paint. It is here that the realms of Tiepolo and Richter collide. In these paintings, as in the similar yellow-and-orange compositions, the thin, scraped-down areas of paint not rarely allow the weave of the linen to display through.

Snaking around three walls of the gallery was a closely hung file of 20 small works (some measuring no more than 5 by means of 7 inches) on paper and Plexiglas. Titled Orthogonal body 1-20, these works use sand, papier mache, oil paint, ink and various sealers to create bumpy and gritty surfaces that repeatedly resemble relief maps. In her topographical way Hatz can evoke satellite views of hellenic islands, details of coral take ins or barren mountainous landscapes. flat in the smallest pieces, it's easy for a viewer to earn enjoyably lost among the miniature crags and crevasses, which are sometimes dusted with pigment.

There is always a fine balance in Hatz's work between sheer materiality and allusion, whether it be to geography, art history or the science of fractals. Assisted by the agency of her distinctive paint stroke--a short, sinuously angled line--and a highly disciplined use of color, Hatz is a compelling painter level at postcard size. I direct the eye forward to being able to diocese more of her work at a larger scale.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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