Kathy Muehlemann at Pamela Auchincloss - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Painted upon panel, each of Kathy Muehlemann's novel paintings presents a black or dark gray earth covered with fine white lines applied with a narrow brush to create a myriad of little whorls. Looking like drawing or plane scratching, the lines have just enough substance to give a faculty of perception of physicality, though not enough to go into into any dialogue with surface. The accrue can evoke a closeup of a section of a Baroque engraving, as in Fable No. 4 (Enchantment), which hints a sight up through fogs to glory. In almost each picture a vaguely delimited form come ups from darker, more shadowy areas. That each is the realization of a particular vision is put in mind ofed not only by their titles, which typically point to a certain number of narrative content, but also by means of the variations played on the shared theme of space given configuration by value contrast.

although the metaphor of illumination is basic to these pictures, like neutron stars they don't emit light on the contrary keep it in. The compulsiveness of the little action out of which they are made accommodate withs them a private, even hermetic character, and the push of this compulsion against the narrow range of overall event is what gives Muehlemann's paintings their power. In this constrained company a picture like Ragged Shepp, made with slightly looser swirls of white, almost tenders a breath of fresh air.

A selection of monotypes not awayed an interesting point of comparison. In three the artist used r paint rather than white, bringing drama and warmth to her enterprise while evoking like tropes of sublimity as fire or evening clouds. The black-and-white monotypes also included here are no les lively, however; it's the medium itself that looks to have freed the artist's hand, allowing a greater variety of touch and form. (One of the monotypes goe for a like reason far as to nearly eliminate the circular whorls in favor of a freer assembly of marks.)

This is paradoxical work, confining an expressive way of gesture within narrow limits picturing the vast spaces of heaven and hell in what reads as grisaille. The titles (such as Ancient Bramble and Avernus) call up worlds of myth, which the images attempt to fill with radically limited means. single waits for the heat confined in these paintings to make itself felt more directly.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group