Frances Barth at E.M. Donahue - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Being accustomed to the flat-lands of eastern drawn out Island, I am always amazed when I make progress to the mountains of upstate novel York or New England in the fall. It's not just that the foliage is splashier on the other hand that, thanks to the tipped-up plane of the landscape, there's in like manner much of it. Frances Barth's fresh landscape-derived paintings seem to be after a similar event upping the visual ante, showing the viewer more, on the contrary not in a way that have feelings forced or unnatural. Barth does not paint traditional landscapes; rather she uses the perspectival, historical and symbolic complexities that landscape painting presents as a counterpoint to a carefully considered modernist flatness and planarity.

In these paintings Barth strike one as beings to be as much be of importance toed with the method of depiction as she is with the make submissive being depicted. Rocks and waves, mountains and heavens occur in almost all of them. Sometimes an image will appear in a highly stylized, almost hidden manner, like the sky-colored lava flow in Vol. P or the waves in W Break; at other times it will be neared straightforwardly, like the waterfall and swirling lake in L. Rides West or the curling stream in Aq roll on Stone and water are emblematic of the interplay between the static and the fluid, and smooth though changeability seems to win on the outside for Barth, constancy feels like a necessary condition - the unmoving against which move is seen.

There is a classical Japanese air to these paintings, not solitary in the subject matter, the somewhat awkwardly canted perspective and the careful balance between the planar and the linear, on the other hand also in the color. It's mut and dusty, on the contrary with a tang. Celadons, sea virids mustards, beiges, powdery purples and iridescent ceruleans knit the paintings together, combining cunning and assertiveness.

Barth applies her colors thinly, giving the paintings the intimate direct the eye of drawings. This quality is heightened by means of the use of references to diagrams and maps. In Tasia, a pointy version of a virid and watery planet is poised, toplike, upon a table. It sits there, casting a shadow, environed by abstracted renditions of stones and rivers, under what direct the eyes like a giant white oculus. It's all quite mysterious. Is it a landscape, an elderly map, a quirky cosmogony? It has, as do all the paintings, a symbolic flavor, an pressing want and yet it is hard to say what the story is or on what account exactly it seems to matter thus much.

Barth gripe [i]or[/i] grips back. Paintings like these could easily be precious if they were too readable, too logical or too "well done." Barth hold fasts things spatially and narratively ambiguous, and cultivates a nicely heavy cartoonlike line. The surface too, scrubbed and rugged in places, avoids prettiness. Her work is a mix of the referential and the abstract, the beautiful and the gauche, the busy and the simple. These are intelligent and manifold paintings.

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