Connie Fox at the Parrish Art Museum and Arlene Bujese - Southampton, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The canvases in "Focus: Connie Fox" at the Parrish Museum each reveal sum of two units coexisting directions: the urge to run over a story and the ne to experience the paint as action, efficacy and material. Influenced early in her career by dint of Abstract Expressionism, Fox trusts the proces of creation to take her into the heart of her painting. Another important factor was Fox's Depression-era childhood in eastern Colorado, upon the edge of the dust goblet She tells of the region's devastating storms and tornadoes and by what mode she remembers being unable to diocese anything but clouds of dust. Her early, dramatically tilted landscapes (not in this present to view which was devoted to work done since 1988) gaze as if they had been painted at the cutting side of the world.

The signs and signs that populate Fox's recent paintings strike one as being to show only parts of themselves, surfacing like the tips of icebergs just lengthy enough to suggest vast, unperceived submerged life. By using brushwork to blacken and efface her images, Fox creates a faculty of perception of continual metamorphosis. She accomplishes this with abundant gusto in Tropical Paradise (1 994) a painting compact with passages of mysterious virid black, ocher, earth colors and creamy white tones. With its large vocabulary of marks and gesturings Tropical Paradise could be a painting about painting, on the contrary it might just as easily be about, say, a vista of celestial expanse and beach in Florida.

Postage to be paid (1 994) is composed of deliciously creamy pigment applied around a multicolored patchwork grid in the center of the canvas. over the painting, the motifs--which include a schematic house and landscape elements--seem to be continually rising and sinking. The way in which Postage owed is balanced between the physicality of the paint and its fragmentary images makes the painting single of Fox's most refined works. The color-suffused Hammer (1 992) is dominated by the agency of two forms, a large cerulean arrow held between horizontal amethystine lines and, above, a giant paintbrush, which might also be a microphone. In the background of this active painting are several pinwheel forms in various colors.

The combining of apparently unrelated ultimate parts is at the center of Fox's work, reflecting the consequence of Surrealism on her imagination. Other admitted influences have been the films of Cocteau and Fellini. This may help explain the pervasive near-cinematic regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements in Fox's paintings with their abrupt transitions and flashing interruptions of image and action These varied and continuous disjunctions create a place where, as the artist places it in the catalogue, "chance, memory, desire and coincidence tend hitherward together." (The handsome catalogue was done in collaboration with the Weatherspoon Gallery of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where the display was also seen.

A harmonizing show at the Arlene Bujese Gallery comprised 12 smaller acrylics upon paper. While the works upon paper largely follow the paintings, their vision is more carefree and unrevised, closer to Abstract Expressionism.

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