Toni LaSelle at Berta Walker - Provincetown, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions

Sometimes, as single looks out over Provincetown Harbor, the horizon line that separates Cape codfish Bay from the southern heavens is a thin, shimmery strip. This irresolute cutting side separating two absolutes recalls the black-andwhite paintings of Myron Stout, who painted in Provincetown for many years, and it may also have informed the work of Toni LaSelle, who cites nature as the prime influence of her nonobjective geometric paintings. Stout's colleague and a comrade native of Denton, Texas, LaSelle first came to Provincetown in 1944 to investigation with Hans Holmann and reportedly urg Stout to do the same. LaSelle combined painting with a lengthy teaching career at what is now Texas Women's University, where she arranged for Holmann's first Texas exhibition. Now, at 93 LaSelle has belatedly had her first solo exhibit in Provincetown, a small retrospective that spans nearly 50 years.

Comparisons with Stout are inevitable to those who knew them the pair and there are still discussions here about who influenced whom in their prime working years. This selection of LaSelle's handsome and colorful works furnishes no definitive answers. The best of her paintings strike one as being to derive broadly from general modernist abstraction. Her foundations are in Mondrian, Miro, Holmann and MoholyNagy, on the other hand her works take a particular organic bent. Proces was obviously important to her. Her yielding ambiguous edges are not as labored above as Stout's were, and thus not especially charged with his obsessive friction. Rather, in Suspension, 1948 she has casually traced around the cutting sides of a large blue hemisphere with lime-green oil stick and around a smaller r shape with orange. These lusty buoyant forms limned with uncorrupted clashing colors create a happy offhand lyricism. Scraped areas and sparse patches of dry-brushing contribute to the searching nevertheless cheerfully confident tone.

In Puritan, also 1948 the shapes have the appearance cushioned in their fields of white paint like realitys carefully laid in packing tissue. The chiefly black, gray and green oblong rectangles and triangles look tender; they appear to have just emerg and to have left shadows or husks behind them. In greatest in quantity of the works LaSefle's shapes are les separate from their backgrounds than Stout's positive-negative images. Doxology #2 and #3 sum of two units of her smaller works from 1956 insinuate trays of bright geometric jewels--diamonds, squares and triangles-- embedded in thick, chalky white loams In some cases the shapes appear to have been brushed in, then reserv with tape that was shakeed away after the layers of white paint were applied. Overall, these sum of two units small works are gay and entrancing, harlequinesque or randomly confettilike.

The larger and later Atlantic Wind, 1963 is, by means of contrast, neutral-toned, regimented and orderly, the cutting sides more resolute, the surface les painterly. This work, and the many small land-and seascape-inspired paper collages from new years, indicate a strong design faculty of perception is still present-one that thankfully was not allowed to dominate the more visceral, random sensibilities in LaSelle's earlier work.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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