Amy Sillman at Casey M. Kaplan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Amy Sillman's fresh paintings should help settle the question of painting's efficacy for, oh at least the nearest year-and-a-half. They are not sole intrinsically wonderful, but they also remind us of what we delight in in all kinds of other paintings, past and not away Eastern and Western. Sillman has been held an exemplary member of a 'toon-besotted posse of painters that includes Lari Pittman, Christian Schumann, Jane Fine, Elliott verdant Nicole Eisenman, Elena Sisto and Laura Newman. However diverse in intention and issue their work may be together they constitute single of the noteworthy developments within contemporary painting in the last half decade. It should also be noted that a similar cartoonal wiggle has been animating a certain number of of the most interesting abstraction of late.

Sillman's cartooning is closer to personal doodling and the lengthy history of caricature than it is to pop/comic material, and it is on the contrary one element in her vast formal vocabulary. At residence among pictorial traditions from around the globe, Sillman has exhausted time in Japan and India and has clearly been influenced by the agency of the pictorial and brush traditions of the couple cultures, as well as the metaphysical watchs of both Buddhism and Hinduism. single painting with a glowing, yolky fulvous center has the names of the bardo stages in the Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation circle of time written in its four corners.

The pictures are generally set uped as rebuslike chains or successions of loosely connected and overlaid images. The notable exception is Beauty Pageant, where a grid of grinning women's faces is half wiped on the outside by a swath of green. More characteristically complex is the impressive View From Lake Michigan, in which a small figure, seen from the back, stands upon a strand painted in a red Ensor-like shimmer. The figure gazes upward in an apparent trance at a colossal head form in the top center of the picture which is seeping a drawn out train of what could be glistening tears or globules of semen. The hovering head breaks down into several faces and calligraphically interwoven, glowing colors. High in the air and directly above the figure upon the ground floats the head and shoulders of a man, also with his back to us. I think of the painting as a delight in letter expressing longing due to separation and also a mystical awe at the power of feeling to reach out beyond the self.

Sillman paints in an unusual combination of oil and gouache. Layers are built up scraped away and overlayed over, producing luxurious color densities and surface passages from silky matte to glistening glosse Perhaps not thus incidentally, the rewarding labor intensiveness of Sillman's surfaces reminds us of painting's peculiar relationship to time, the way it bears the entire history of its making with equal reason lightly. The components of Sillman's work may be theoretically and formally intricate on the other hand as in great forebears of the like kind as Poussin and Turner, the event is of an effortless simultaneity.

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