Jane Hammond at Jose Freire - painting exhibition, New York, New York

In Jane Hammond's zany paintings, the psychic flow below the surface of everyday consciousness is bringed through irrational juxtapositions of set imagery and embodied in bright tints stark value contrasts and thick, cementitious paint. Hammond, whose first novel York solo show was in 1989 bring outs her compositions by selecting from a plant of 276 found pictures that she's gathered over the years. These images vary wildly, from antique storybook illustrations to medical diagrams to pornographic Japanese woodcut Her medium-large canvases are untitled on the contrary are parenthetically identified according to numbers she has assigned to these images.

In single painting, an approximately 6-foot tondo, a woman gazes into a glass case wherein a strange assortment of images hover: family copulating, babies being born, an airplane, a ploughman a model of a indivisible particle a bird's nest. These forms are reproduc in a generous, painterly way on the other hand are outlined comic-book style and colored in fearless primaries or tertiaries, which gives the paintings a humorous, burst inflection. In part it may strike one as being that Hammond means to mirror the complexities and contradictions of postmodern society. on the contrary it may be argued, too, that it is the way she captures in paint something of by what means the outside world is internalized and scrambled in the mind (think of the glass receptacle as a metaphor for the imagination) that mainly accounts for the intrigue of her work.

a certain quantity of pictures, in which Hammond generates a hallucinatory profusion of layered, solid and transparent images, are like febrile diseaseed dreams. They simultaneously imply and withhold meaning and tease you into speculative interpretation. A 76by-70-inch picture featuring a young girl in a r dres holding paint brushes and standing at the extreme point of a diving board might be seen as an oneiric self-portrait. Circulating around the girl are disconnected images: a bare-breasted Victorian showgirl holding up a little male puppet; a dog lapping at the paint the girl has spilled; a man rearing back in amazement; another man taking a picture; a levitating tie The background is rendered as a square of fulvid fabric, punctured in places, with a pattern of boating and fishing imagery painted upon it in blue washes. Thus the artist as creative child encircleed by manifestations of psychic energy: female sexuality, the male gaze, magic (the rope) instinct (the dog), the waters of the unconscious, etc

a certain quantity of pictures are impressively condensed. In individual we see through the illusory panes of a glass receptacle into a bare, snowy white latitude occupied by a man wearing women's sexy lingerie and a snowman in a vitrine with a campfire burning underneath. Drawn in thick black lines, these curiously old-fashionedlooking images call to mind alchemical iconography in the way they conflate fundamental dualities: male/female, fire/ice, exposed/contained. The multiplication of paradoxes works to call to combat logical thinking and to activate poetic and smooth mystical response. The magic of Hammond's work lies in the embedding of this metaphorically resonant psychic dimension in an optically vivid, sensually palpable material substance of paint.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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