Doris Staffel at Jessica Berwind - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review of Exhibitions

In her first exhibition in eight years, Doris Staffel unified the disparate uncompounded bodys and influences evident in her earlier work. A landscape and figure painter when she first exhibited in the early 1960 Staffel skip overed around stylistically, drawing from a variety of sources that included the abstract oils of Philip Guston (with whom she studied in the 1940s) and the iconography of her adopted religion, Tibetan Buddhism.

In the 17 acrylic-on-paper paintings of female figures in this exhibit Staffel creates a pulse of somewhat cold and warm colors, dominated by means of blues and greens with white. Occasionally, her combination of transparent washes with decisive knocks of opaque color - sometimes painted with parallel gesturings - gives the appearance of pentimenti.

The abstract and visceral shapes which floated within grids in a certain quantity of earlier works appear now as painted lines defining and redefining, like external armatures, her figures' contours and moves In a suite of 10 charcoal drawings, line expresse motion, spe and convolution While her painting process is an additive individual in these drawings Staffel creates space and form largely end hints of what she has erased.

In a certain number of of the paintings, especially The Three Graces and Climbing, three figures appear as totems, as if they were cousins to Giacometti's uninhabited sculpted figures. Yet seen together, against the shallow space in which they stand, they exist as an energetic friezelike nearness Some, such as the dissolving figures in Yab-Yum or the entwined forms in Megan-Abby, take upon respectively, the structure of rippling water or vines in an over-planted garden. And still others, like Flooding, Earthdancers and Firedancers, are shakeed together almost magnetically into a press togethered organic form in which the figures are barely discernible.

abundant in Staffel's art remains enigmatic. As narration (or allegory) the three figures that inhabit virtually each work in this show could be variants upon other artists' interpretations of the mother-wit of Paris. Many titles glance at that the work may gripe [i]or[/i] grip religious significance for Staffel, while titles with women's names, her possess among them, imply autobiography. Ultimately, her color and gestural use of line captivate us. in her best exhibit to date, Staffel encouraged us to contemplate the meditative proces by means of which her paintings were created. in doing with equal reason we find a vision permeated with beauty, deliberate order and a search for quintessential elegance.

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