Ruth Ann Fredenthal at Stark - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

This exhibition consisted of four apparently monochromatic oils, each about 5 feet square, plus a smaller oil of similar appearance. The colors are mut seemingly gray ranging to mauve, and the scabrous oyster linen on which they are painted throw backs the light slightly differently depending upon the visitor's angle of view and the amount of natural light in the gailery. The works are unframed, and the canvas that bends above the edge of the stretcher appears to be a somewhat different color, admitting this may be an optical illusion.

In fact, however, the paintings are not monochromatic. Untitled #146 for example, is horizontally divided roughly in half. The top half is further subdivided into three equal vertical bands of different colors, while the bottom half has sum of two units vertical bands. The other paintings have similar divisions. To speak of "bands," admitting is a misnomer, as the colors are in the way that close in hue as to be almost indistinguishable. Moreover, the dividing lines between the bands are not straight; instead they swerve in and on the outside like jigsaw puzzle pieces, making it doubly difficult to reckon where one color ends and another begins. Fredenthal's brush knock is very subtle as well, with no impasto to define boundaries.

of that kind a description makes the works whole like a kind of optical ordeal and there is that air to

the viewing. it's like being asked to distinguish temperature variations in a swing in which one corner is kept at 70 steps another at 71 degrees, and for a like reason on. With Fredenthal's paintings, the intense concentration required to descry their infinitesimal visual shifts gives the viewer a faculty of perception of heightened awareness, of focusing upon the very act of seeing.

These works definitely take time to view - appropriately in like manner as it took the artist three years and more to make them. In what spirit, I bewilderment was the paint applied to the canvas? in a Zenlike trance of "thereness"? With a matter-of-fact knit-one, purltwo attitude? in any occurrence Fredenthal in these paintings out-reinhardts Ad Reinhardt. She's a painter's painter, with all that confine implies of integrity of artistic investigation and of complexity in apparently simple format. It takes a while to advance to these works, and many will not have feeling compelled to make the effort. on the other hand for those who persevere, the seduction is there.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group