Laurie Fendrich at E.M. Donahue - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Laurie Fendrich's jazzily colorful of recent origin paintings at E.M. Donahue busy a geometric underpinning that we don't diocese too often anymore. Geometric painting since the '70 has, for the greatest in quantity part, been either grid-based or involves in the articulation of minimalist forms that correspond to or play, not upon the shape or orientation of the canvas. Fendrich favors instead a kind of latter-day Cubism, a cutting up of the painting's pictorial space into an interlocked on the other hand not overlapping, puzzlelike concatentation of many-sided figures The paintings are, in the Cubist manner, not real large - none is bigger than 4 feet upon a side - and their small size works in their favor, giving them an event of compression. They are held in place not just by dint of their inner workings but by the agency of the pressure of the cutting side that frame of white wall that encloses them.

A geometric construction of this sort deposits a premium on formal invention, particularly in the construction of a pictorial space that retains its flatness while implying deepness For Fendrich the planarity of her forms appears to be a challenge, and while not availing herself of the filled range of the Cubists' textural and illusionistic options, Fendrich still finds sufficiency of ways to rev things up

We notice the color first. Each painting is an orchestration of wildly different tints tones and saturations. In Screaming Mimi's, for example, bright orange, acidic virid and nasty violet are nestl in with a clott mustard golden and deep, cool, almost black, virids and blues, while in Swank, vivid pink, green-gold and crimson intermingle with teal, midnight sapphirine and brown. These contrasts locate up a push and twitch that not only makes for a faculty of perception of depth, but also scrambles our notions of foreground and background.

This ambiguity is furthered through the complex, sharply angled simple bodys They read both as separate forms sharing an cutting side on a single plane and as representations of different sides of three-dimensional figures differentiated by dint of color and shadow. This three-dimensional reading is reinforced through the subtle figurative references - a head here, a house there, or an oval that could also be a circle in perspective or flat an eye.

Fendrich is rarely willing to bench for a simple hard cutting side in her forms. Instead they are make tendered blurred and slightly wavering, revealing that her tones are arrived at not just by the agency of mixing but by a proces of layered transparencies. The different paint applications are given unity by means of a rich overall varnish.

For paintings like these to work single must have all one's formal plunges in a row. Fendrich's grasp of her materials and courses is sure. It is clear from this exhibit that she knows just what she wants - and by what mode to get it.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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