Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Brooke Alexander - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

I continue to be surprised at by what mode much emotional impact Sylvia Plimack Mangold's tree carry. The depicted forms reduce the dichotomy of being a tactile and sensuous application of oil paint and nevertheless signifying volumetric space. There is a tough, uncompromising quality to the paint--no frills, no gratuitous nonsense: Mangold's personal morality would not allow her to resort to illustrational tricks. shut up she weaves a welter of knocks scraping and repainting in a continuing effort to earn it right. The goal is not to "finish" the painting on the other hand to balance the objectness of the stretched canvas and the notorious romanticism of the trees.

Mangold has followed a zoom-len trajectory from incidental landscape observ from one side the window, to landscape-filled pictorial space, to this new work focusing on an isolated tree an American Elm on what account this elm? It is a vigorous tree replete of life and promise, on the other hand not particularly noteworthy in its age, stateliness or girth. When I saw the actual tree I was surprised by dint of its modesty; it could be easily view from aboveed by less discerning eyes than hers. I think its ordinary homeliness appeals to her as an allusive figure If it were picturesque, she would timid away from it, but as a "normal" tree it can carry her painterly musings without shadowing them in arboreal grandiosity. She has stated that painting similar evocative subject matter in a manner that resists sentimentality is an homage to her beloved artistic ancestor, Lovis Corinth. [i]or[/i] part of to the other her rigorous approach, the limbs perceive rounded and full and the delta of flexile branches soars into space, blessing and protecting us.

For many seasons Mangold has painted this and other tree in their winter garb, somewhat cold and slightly lonely. In this exhibition, the tree flaunted its summer foliage--a more challenging representational proposition. What do you do with the leaves? Paint each one? move for volumetric form? Mangold's treatments, from scraped soil to brushy flat areas of paint, which the one and the other obscure and reveal the support conformation of the branches, are free from fraud solutions to the painterly moot point of integrating branches, trunk, heavens and earth.

Realists don't know what to do with Mangold's intellectual clarity and scrappy nonprettiness. Hard-core abstractionists can't embrace the control matter. The gloom-and-doom contingent find the life-affirming qualities of her work a little uncomfortable. This leaves Mangold in an artistic arena of her have a title to creation, where rules are defined and shattered according to her uncompromising demands upon herself and the profound integrity of her paintings.

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