Deborah Rosenthal at Bowery - painting - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Deborah Rosenthal became a transform to abstract painting after seeing the Mondrian retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971 This did not lead her to imitate the Dutch artist's Neo-Pasticism. What she discovered in Mondrian was the spirit of dedicated research into the language of painting, and the realization that solitary through abstraction is the expression of reality attainable. Rosenthal's possess artistic roots lie in the arts of the Byzantine and Romanesque periods, which, she perceive s resemble those of our possess time.

Toward a better understanding of her ideas, I pored above an essay she wrote for The of recent origin Criterion (February 1992) describing, among other things, her reasons for making drawings from the Morgan Library's transcript of a Beatus. This great work had its start in manuscript notes by dint of Beatus of Liebana, an Asturian monk who annotateed on texts from the work of Revelations in the 8th hundred Later, in the 11th hundred Maius, a Spanish monk, copied these notes, adding illuminations in tempera, gold leaf and ink. In copying from a facsimile of this manuscript, Rosenthal was reminded of the great masters of modernist abstraction--Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee Leger and the Delaunays.

Rosenthal's densely written essay touches upon other topics, but she is primarily a painter, and a serviceable one, to judge from the vivacity and freshnes of her canvases. Landscape: solitary One Green Place, one of the works greatest in quantity closely resembling stained glass, is made up of light-colored, more or les circular forms contoured by dint of black lines varying in thickness; together they encircle a "face" tautly defined as notwithstanding that with filaments of wrought iron. Symmetria: A Woman and sum of two units Vases is one of the darker paintings, from whose clod emerge three separate and enclos forms. Floral Character, a grouping of six works in charcoal and pastel, recalls the stiffness of Ruskin's drawings of architectural or sculptural details in his Stones of Venice. Light Accompaniment is the greatest in quantity clearly Romanesque work, with curving and scalloped forms providing a stage for an orange-and-blue figure in the center

Rosenthal expresse her visions in the language of modernist abstraction. nevertheless one senses behind the 20th-century surface a parallel universe: vestiges of mosaics, iron work, stained glass, the architecture and statuary of Romanesque cathedrals, heraldic images, flowers, vine leaves, the silver grays of light falling on stone. It is as granting she voyages on a sea of discovery between the alpha and omega of pictorial metaphor.

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