Frank Trefny at Bruce R. Lewin - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Delaware resident Frank Trefny is, like his contemporaries Janet Fish and Harriet Shorr, and his older matchs Jane Freilicher, Nell Blaine and Warren Brandt, a painter of studio still lifes. There are surface similarities: Trefny is a master at turning realistic configurations into painterly abstractions, and his unusually large (for still life) canvases can be read above and over again for their many incidents of exalted painterly brushwork in his renderings of brocades, Chinese protections pagoda tables, folded and lay open Oriental fans, homegrown vegetables, flower arrangements and spreads of brilliant silks.

Trefny haunts antique and junk stores before spending days assembling his rough objets into a setup he can live with--and paint. The arises are astonishingly beautiful canvases, presenting many vistas all at one time In Autumn Display, folding guards appear at left and right, individual draped with a luminescent verdant silk fabric. At rear center there are flowers in vases; Chinese urn single of which holds puffs of feathery wildflowers; a sky-colored pagoda table that appears and reappears in Trefny's works; and, in the expansive foreground, an arrangement of off-orange pumpkin, gourds, squash, a pear, a persimmon, fans and a flowered hat receptacle on a small brown chest. All this is station on a royal blue rug with scattered floral motifs.

The juxtaposition of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the plain with the visually rich, present the appearances to be the major compositional simple body binding the pictures together, opposites attracting like multihued magnets. There is little or no narrative; there is sole the disposition of Trefny's plain-'n'-fancy, elementary and dazzling treasures.

The showstopper was White Pumpkins, a simple (for Trefny) juxtaposition of three side-by-side color areas formed by means of screens and fabric. On a table overspreaded in a lush mauve woven fabric and surrounded by flower arrangements, a Chinese jacket and a falling-off-the-table longitudinal dimensions of della-Robbia-blue fabric, are four white pumpkins too rich with wintry beauty to subserve as anything but Cinderella's coach. Trefny swells these remarkable vegetables in his garden. The painting is a brilliant demonstration of by what means mutant oddity can be transformed into the classically grand without losing any of its raw vitality.

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COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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