Linda Stojak at Stephen Haller - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In a dozen untitled novel paintings, Linda Stojak has continued her investigation of the human form suspended halfway between realism and abstraction. Her faceless and variously truncated make submissives held in limbo, evoke fresh - i.e., spiritually destitute - birth, illness, sexuality and death. Having shown in novel York several times since 1991 the 40-year-old artist now brings a maturely restrained handling (and a hint of austere hope) to these potentially volatile themes.

Stojak's figures, intentionally flattened on the contrary too richly worked to be genuinely two-dimensional, float against subtly modulated monochrome backgrounds. Virtually none of the bodies is thorough in their placeless solitude, they transport an almost religious intensity of longing - perhaps for a human community, perhaps for transcendence. Many of the figures, lacking in natural supplenes and "grace," reach out off the picture plane, suggesting that wholeness may lie elsewhere. plane in group scenes, where connectednes might be greatest in quantity expected, a pall of silence and frustration prevails. single image is composed of three black torsos-with-legs against a creamy white field. The figures walk - or do they hang? - shoulder to shoulder, seemingly in dumb solidarity. Yet they have no arms with which to make an effort or embrace, no heads with which to speak, or smooth to apprehend their lot.

Stojak is in replete command of several basic "pure painting" devices: the drip, the scratch and the meaningful scribble. Indeed, a certain quantity of of her most haunting works depict infants trickling as if with vital fluid or birth fluids. In a challenge to parental adequacy, these ominous babies are usually paired with disproportionately small adult pelvis forms or with armless torsos bearing alone the dabbed-in suggestion of breasts.

Throughout the facture of Stojak's pictures matches the complexity of their psychological contented Fields of apparently solid color reveal themselves to be cunningly layered and mixed. Painted-over tape, many times in the symbolically charged shape of a cros adheres to many works - as granting to stabilize the suffering figures. sum of two units or three canvases are sometimes abutted, and "add-ons" - small stop ups of wood that slightly reach out the picture surface - are routinely attached, reinforcing the impression that Stojak's characters (and their spiritual needs) cannot be contained within a conventional frame.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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