Judith Streeter at Stephen Haller - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Judith Streeter's paintings constantly threaten to split asunder. The illusion that these paintings are held together sole by the most precarious of ligaments is subtly reinforced by Streeter's palette - rust, brown gray - which remind ofs various kinds of organic decomposition. Peeling areas of paint likewise connote deterioration.

Streeter organizes this lexicon of entropy around conflicting horizontal and vertical axes. She generally places single horizontal zone of color along the bottom of the painting, with a next to the first one occupying the remaining portion above. Inevitably, this division signifies landscape. Streeter further divides her compositions by the agency of using a cross shape to split the "sky" and sometimes the "earth." She has stated that the crosse in her paintings should not be read as allegorical representatives but as signs of duality, of the meeting between the physical and the transcendent.

In other works, which Streeter bourns "fissure paintings," there is no cros sole a vertical split in the middle of the painting. The support have the appearances to be cracking in sum of two units as the break exposes the underlying panel, however the precarious symmetry holds. The central forms are activated by the agency of circular and zigzag incisions in the surface which act as stitches to grasp the painting together. Streeter also pays shut attention to the edges of her paintings, wrapping them with lead-colored metal or leaving them bare to make bare the layers of the plywood support.

The lick-and-a-promise esthetic which initially appear to bes to inform the works gradually gives way to something more solid. Instead of falling apart before our organ of sights Streeter's process-driven paintings turn without to hold together beautifully.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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