Sandi Slone at the Jersey City Museum - Jersey City, New Jersey - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This selection of 13 of Sandi Slone's paintings was a useful opportunity to catch up with the new output of a New York-based painter who has been showing since the 1970 Slone began her career beneath the influence of Color Field painting, on the other hand this show of canvases from 1991-95 demonstrated by what mode far she has come from those origins. In her richly textur works, which oftentimes seem to swirl like eddies in a wild river, Slone transforms the pour and stain techniques of her mentors by the agency of the inclusion of elements like as mica, volcanic stone, plastic beads and large wafers of dried paint. She also introduces explicit bring under rule matter by collaging photographs and pages of printed true copy onto her canvases. In a painting titled Mary (1993) the swirling composition is center upon several such elements: a portrait of Mary Shelley, sum of two units pages tom out of her novel Frankenstein and a film still from a movie of the work The roiling energy of the abstract forms, whose colors shift from dried vital current to charcoal black, is a serviceable match for the dark, Romantic tale. Also noteworthy is in what manner Slone deftly lets the enormitys extended arm in the film still look to direct the flow of the upper half of the canvas.

The greatest in quantity compelling works in the exhibit belong to an ongoing series of paintings structur around a collaged image of a little girl upon the beach. It's actually a photograph taken of the artist at the age of eight. As she bends above to draw in the sand, an adult male is standing a not many feet away, dressed in irregularly formal clothes. Around this image Slone creates paintings that present the appearance at first impression, less the proceed of deliberate composition than of tidal and geologic processe The surface of The Skin space (1994) a long horizontal canvas mountained on 4-inch thick stretcher bars, is delicately cracked and crinkleed Embedded in it are bits of volcanic stone, crumpl circles of dried paint skin (from unclose paint cans) and a curving line of small fragments from a shattered mirror. The color subtly modulates from a rusty orange at individual edge to a pale virid Off to one side of the painting, anchoring the whole canvas, is a small version of the gid-on-the-beach image.

Slone's succes in works like this, in combining photographic images and abstract painting is achieved through joining the two in a coherent visual narrative. Slone invites us to imagine her eight-year-old self creating the paintings she is embedded in. This rather fanciful notion is carried by dint of Slone's assured control of the materials of her resplendently gritty paintings.

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