Joanna Pousette-Dart at Tenri - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Pairs of eccentrically shaped canvases and fluid, gestural brushstrokes are the substance and the nature of Joanna Pousette-Dart's recent paintings. Finding ample working space in the shaped-canvas arena between the quirky contours and images of Elizabeth Murray and the more formal, put togethered abstractions of Dorothea Rockburne, Pousette-Dart makes delicately balanced diptychs of sum of two units irregular shapes that interlock like pieces of a perplex and interact with painterly nuance. She engages curvilinear and angular shapes in these five paintings (from the last sum of two units years) and sets one part upon top of another to establish a gravitational interdependence that at times determines what happens upon the surface. However, she ofttimes applies paint as if to display that her work is more intuitive than systematic.

In her last fresh York solo, in 1988, Pousette-Dart proffered multipaneled, rectilinear paintings that contrasted large areas of dark, saturated color with passages of intense-hued vertical or horizontal painterly gesturings Forms were alluded to rather than described. Her common use of rounded edges has coincided with a softening of the pair her palette and her expressionist tendencies.

In Gold Diptych (1994) a gently curv canvas sits piggyback upon another of a similar shape on the contrary larger size. Pousette-Dart enhances the interaction by the agency of using a metallic gold with closely valued earth colors, including minor-keyed variations of ocher and of gold green. Delicate washes of cerulean violet and silver activate the surface they present the appearance to hover above, offering a web of spatial complexity. The issue is one of quietude with an inner turbulence

This relationship is inverted in the large virid Dctsw (1994-95), in which the upper canvas balances precariously upon a rounded-off "base." With its arched top, the diptych bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos the silhouette of some ancient oriental garden statuary Deep warm and cool virids mingle and blend, and colors lighten toward the cutting sides In the center of each canvas, a swirl of circular brushstrokes glance ats empty vessels or just delineates a void.

Three drawings displayed permutations of the bird wing or capsule forms that evolve into Pousette-Dart's curv supports. one as well as the other shape and line, they recall the exploratory drawings of Guston and others who sought essential forms with resonance beyond their descriptive identity.

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