Virginia Cuppaidge at Rosenberg & Kaufman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

One could say Australian-born artist Virginia Cuppaidge is a painter's painter. In this, her 20th solo exhibition, she showed six novel oil paintings on canvas and as many works upon paper, all as demanding and problematic as they are alluring. In more [i]or[/i] less ways, her brightly colored works are sensuous, lyrical abstractions, on the other hand Cuppaidge is not merely on the outside to please. On each canvas she leaves substantial evidence of her arduous painting proces which involves a remarkable transformation from an architectonic form and geometric stability to a les certain sensation of change achieved with aggressive, sometimes dissonant, gestures

In a 4-by-6-foot painting, Forest Traffic II, Cuppaidge locates up in the background a neat geometry of Prussian sapphirine and dark brown triangular shapes. on the contrary she nearly obliterates this order through overpainting it with wild brushstrokes of thick fulvid and mauve. The once placid surface is now dominated through a complex web of tangled lines and clashing, colorful dots and dashes. Masses of vivid markings shift across the surface in irregular on the other hand rhythmic patterns like the rifes of a river.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Ships draw near In, the largest painting upon view, features a background of elongated, curving orange, virid and blue triangles. Narrow bands of fulvous and green help set up an almost Cubist space. They zigzag across the surface and sometimes appear woven into the background shapes. on the contrary the artist has attacked the canvas with slashing brushstrokes of sapphirine and red, seemingly in an attempt to destabilize the composition. These agitated action s hop, skip and jump across the canvas, destroying all possibilities of the architectural order which the geometric foundation strike one as beings to propose.

Cuppaidge takes considerable risks in each of her works. Sometimes she appear to bes to push her overwrought canvases to near disaster, as if with individual more brushstroke her compositions would collapse into an incoherent quagmire. Cosmic Garden, for instance, is a brilliantly colored work in which she has piled layer on layer of jagged, impastoed lines. Although the multitude of frenetic markings have the appearances to cause the picture to seesaw on the brink of chaos, in some way the whole thing manages to coalesce in vibrant, pulsating harmony. It has been said that the art of painting is knowing when to stop. Based upon the works in this exhibition, Cuppaidge is well attuned to that crucial moment

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group