Suzan Frecon at Lawrence Markey and Hirschl & Adler Modern - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

By choosing to present to view her paintings and watercolors in separate venue (paintings at Lawrence Markey, watercolors at Hirschl & Adler), Suzan Frecon could have reinforced the notion that the sum of two units stylistically different bodies of work have little to do with each another. Instead, the double-exhibition format brought on the outside their subtle and complex interrelatedness.

In her small oil-on-panel paintings, Frecon paints in level and controlled strokes, using rich tones of azure ocher and red to define interlocking shapes. When sum of two units colors meet, the thick paint creates a yielding but definite line. These paintings are unpretending and concentrated efforts, intensified in a certain number of cases by areas of painstakingly applied gold leaf. After these highly controll works, you could easily imagine that the loose-gestur watercolors function as a kind of release for the artist. In greatest in quantity of them, Frecon creates a tangle of fluid lines that implies a more focused strength and a slower rhythm than would an uncontroll scribble. Arrayed upon the narrow, horizontal format the artist bring forwards the tangles often resolve into a diptych composition. The lines are execut in cerulean or in a variable r clay color whose issues range from purple to brownish tones. The of advanced age agate-burnished paper Frecon uses absorbs the water, allowing the color to loch and the paper to wrinkle.

The gesturings of the watercolors seem to be at a far transport from the geometries of Frecon's paintings. However, several of recent origin canvases include a sharply defined arc which, although architecturally precise, could well have its gestural origin in the unbind lines of the watercolors. In contrast to the exquisitely flat, interlocking rectangles of the other paintings, these arcpaintings asked to be read perspectivally, notwithstanding the areas of gold leaf baffled like a reading by their refusal to function consistently as either positive or negative space. Frecon's familiar r clay color here was pushed to its purpler tones, and the paintings were compos of a single pigment dissolved in different mediums. When mixed with turpentine, the color became ashen and flat. In oil, it created a compressed translucent red.

In a large canvas, Frecon allowed the oil-based paint extensive areas in which, despite the defined boundaries, it could pond wrinkle and bubble, not unlike her watercolors. The largest arc in this painting defined the sweep of the artist's arm across the canvas, a gesturing given chiseled precision by the application of gold leaf. The painting, titled Luceat ante terminum (Let there be light before the end) swells the way music swells. Here Frecon dares the grandiose, and shakes it off.

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