Mary Heilmann at Pat Hearn - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhilarating display testified to painting's continuing ability to refract, concentrate and create experience. The small-format pictures, almost all made of oil upon gessoed paper, typically play geometry against something other - color, gesture or complexity of construction - to create a density of feeling and idea many times belied by the simplicity of means. In Crimson & Clover for instance, an acidic yellowish virid oblong overlaps another of pinkish vermilion against a white soil the eccentricity of color unhinging the painting's geometric classicism. House of sapphirines counterposes the regularity of a grid against action and intensity of color. The touch here is legible enough to establish a faculty of perception of surface despite the profundity of color. Though luminous, the image is as clos as a wall.

The balanced conflict between the clos and the unclose was a leitmotif of the display in fact, as witness the use of "screen" to little several of the pictures. Like Cartier Bresson indeed brings to mind that photographer's famous image of a black-windowed building; the painting's black rectangles read the one and the other as openings and as shapes sharing a surface with their white clod This double reading reminds us that a window is the couple an opening in, and part of a wall. Richie's Trick provides a particularly composed of several elements variation on this theme, with a field of light aqua painted above conversely positioned sets of black and white squares, whose neo-moderne beauty one as well as the other attracts and checks the organ of sight The physical layering of paint, with careful looking, provides a match for the alternately penetrable and resistant geometry of real space.

Such spatial dualities are replayed more generally in Heilmann's juxtaposition of abstraction and representation. Like a number of artists working today - Dona Nelson is another - Heilmann accepts the distinction between these methods but sees no need to pick out between them; modernism provides her with a language that can be inflected in either direction, or the two at once. A seemingly non-referential painting like Socorro, whose horizontal bands of vibrant color provide a variation upon Heilmann's wall-like grids, was repercussion of sounded by a series of works that, with their blue-black and white bands, are clearly answers to the ocean. (Mondrian, whose influence is unmistakable in Heilmann's work, also lay the foundation of an analogue for the pictorial field in the sea.) Evoking space without representing it, the ocean pictures speak of regularity, power, repetition and size - features painting shares with the waves. Size alone here is not literal; the density of contented in these paintings makes them, however fleetingly, effective equivalents for the breadth of the world outside painting.

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