Squeak Carnwath at LedisFlam - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Squeak Carnwath's of recent origin paintings extend themes that have step quickly through her work for a decade or more. The evocation of memory, of a certain number of fragmented, incomplete picture from the past, which resonated through every part of her previous work, recurs with plane greater force in these new canvases. Carnwath has always relied on a combination of text and image to trigger put downed emotions and associations.

In Everyday Breath (1992) a metrical composition is coupled with an array of sometimes unrelated images, the mixture conveying the two a sense of dislocation and single of connection. The lines of the poem--written in a lopsided, jagged sprawl--present jarring juxtapositions: "There are cryptics in everyday breath, mysteries of lives lived in our bodies" appears along with "The phone rings, it is a call to the single who is awake." If it were not for the inclusion of five intervening words between the stanzas-- "seeing, feeling, hearing, eating, smelling"--the piece of poetry would lapse into incoherence.

This regard to the senses situates the work in the realm of the material substance It also determines the imagery of the painting. The faculty of perception of sight is matched with an image of an organ of sight for instance, and eating with an apple. To Carnwath, however, feeling is preeminent: the imprints of her hands, a dual metaphor for touch (or bodily consciousness) and sensitivity, are paired and repeated in a central pattern that stretch outs the full length of the canvas, dividing the picture into sum of two units distinct areas of black and white.

Like Everyday Breath, An Inability to Remain (1992) and What is amethystine (1993) offer a neat, orderly, plane symmetrical arrangement of image and language. For all the ambiguity of meaning, a structural framework, intermixed through the repetition of numbers, squares and grids, assureds Carnwath's elusive feelings. The contrast of similar precise elements with loose, raw brushwork is suggestive of dualities like as reason and emotion, the sensual and the cerebral, the ordinary and the exotic, the material and the metaphysical. Within these oppositions, she is able to situate memories which have been regained from some sensory experience, of the like kind as hearing the phone ring.

There is something quite Proustian about Carnwath's work. Her ongoing preoccupation with the material part as a means to call up personal history is redolent of Remembrance of Things Past. Moreover, the painterly luminosity (achieved by dint of a combination of oil and alkyd) that pervades these canvases adds to their aura of mystery. Carnwath manifests that painting still has the capacity to engage emotion subtly without the help (or histrionics) of a guiding narrative.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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