Rebecca Purdum at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Rebecca Purdum's capricious large-scale abstractions are frequently compared to Turner's seascapes, a comparison she does not particularly favor. notwithstanding her great, slow gusts of weathered colors inevitably recall the British painter's later phases, level if Turner was still making representational paintings while Purdum is not.

Looking not real different from her previous work, these novel paintings continue to mine the tradition of Northern Romanticism with an perfect lack of self-consciousness or irony. however even as you resist Purdum's tinted, mirage-filled hazes you find yourself succumbing to their dreamlike ambience, gilded light and elusive, beckoning colors. Amorphous at first, her paintings extremity up being astringent, pulled taut into a finely balanced a whole of densities and weights, of closely-valued color harmonies and transitions.

Purdum works the paint with her fingers--rubbing it in, polishing it--so that her contact with the materials is direct. These paintings are about the pleasures of paint and about the sensations that color can transmit The eye plunges into thin, muffl layers of warm and somewhat cold shades--violets, greens, blues, yellows, grays, oranges. In a number of works, the luminosity is mainly of a crepuscular kind; an exception is a canvas that be incandescents like a rosy dawn. The three small paintings that were shown are more solid, compact and textur single of these, with a coral-tinged impasto, was almost carnal, while another--dark, somber and with a touch of red--might have been taken from individual of Goya's "Black Paintings."

There was too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of work for the gallery; the expansive qualities of Purdum's paintings demand ample breathing latitude Nonetheless, it is always a pleasure to lay out time with her mix of things glimpsed, things obscur and things imagined. At their best, these works transform matter into uncorrupted miraculous feeling.

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