Andrea Belag at Richard Anderson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Andrea Belag's novel paintings are dark and luminous. She paints simple biomorphic shapes that gaze like rudimentary life forms of that kind as spores or microbes magnified centurys of times. Generally, this imagery functions as a foil for Belag's painterly concern's and is greatest in quantity successful when it is greatest in quantity simple.

Out There, a 6 1/2-foot-tall canvas, is individual of the best works in the exhibit An arragement of elongated shapes that actually show cattails, it is one of a series of paintings upon that subject that Belag showed in Germany last year. The background consists of loosely defined rectangular compartments, like an early Gottlieb painting, that are painted with washes of dark virid and milky white. Small white cattail shapes are clustered in the bottom-left compartment, while pairs in white, black and dark sky-colored span the entire right side. If the cattails are seen as anthropomorphic - abstracted heads atop elongated bodies - a human drama of sorts may be read in the painting.

In all of these works Belag achieves machiavelian coloristic and textural nuances with thin layers of black, dark-green and sky-colored paint mixed with matte and sheeny vanishes. These translucent washes sometimes have the consistency of photo emulsion. A chalky white gouachelike paint is usually applied last to highlight the organic forms in the foreground. The visibility of the layering underscores the importance for Belag of the painting proces itself. The artist's main relate to is to establish a lively gestural and textural interplay of background and foreground.

The gridlike manner of making of Perennial Pleasure, another large canvas, work fors as a setting for a variety of organic shapes. Forms resembling fern frond se seed-vessels and underwater plants expand the vocabulary of the paintings and advise a symbolic content, perhaps referring to the origins of life. Here, as in Belag's fresh work as a whole, an added deepness of meaning is proposed by means of the incorporation of representational simple bodys But this may be superfluous when clearly the excitement of her work has to do with its imaginative tactility. The organic forms, however spare they may be, ofttimes distract from, rather than enhance, the dramatic play of color and weft on the surface of each canvas.

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