Gail Fitzgerald at Stephanie Theodore - painting exhibition, New York, New York

Gail Fitzgerald has in novel years explored knots--literally, in tie sculptures, and more abstractly as images in a assemblage of paintings she showed this season. She paints by means of moving opalescent pigment through wet urethane dispersion, creating knotlike gesticulations alive with light. Her paintings' translucent surfaces are thick, of great depth and fluid, with several layers in which the action s coalesce and disband. Much of Fitzgerald's work is brilliant and pale; in this exhibit there were newer examples in dark purple and silvery virids uncannily charged with reflective light. The work is unbelievably quiet and isolated as, at its best, it creates a situation in which an apparently infinite deepness of visual experience reveals little that is definite.

In Sometimes "Y" for example, a spill of urethane whorls in unfasten pink knots, while in the background a trace of virid line peeks through. The pink action s suggest a kind of skywriting that has been distorted by the agency of the wind; the implication is of a barely contained chaos. This impression is plane more pronounced in the darker paintings, where the knots are more calligraphic, as in Josephine Knot. Here they form meaningless metallic ideograms that gaze as if extracted from the silvery opalescence of the background. They look to offer a Rosetta stone of meaning, single to withhold the key to the collection of laws Those paintings in which the figure/ surface of land relation becomes too differentiated are les prosperous For example You Again, at 76 by the agency of 94 inches, is the largest painting in the exhibit but neither subtle nor varied enough to pluck off the scale. The a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of smaller "e'; though similar, works better precisely because it's for a like reason small, with a wacky little wrenchlike form placed exactly at its center This is a work that does not examine to accomplish anything too heroic, and individual in which the artist's whimsy is given vent

Several paintings make the knot motif a great deal of less apparent, or even relinquish it altogether. In Bottoms Up reddish action s infiltrated by silver eddy in a purple turf streaked with reflection. In extremity to End the knot form has virtually disappeared, replaced by dint of sweeping, brushlike marks of the same color as the soil and only intermittently highlighted. Here there are no longer discrete gesturings but sudden shifts or intensifications of the painting's inherent substance. In Naught Fitzgerald get backs punningly to her predominant motif, on the other hand here the knot does a loop-de-loop in a surface of land of modulated whites. Splotches of sapphirine make the work look like an overcast canopy of heaven This small painting (18 by dint of 16 inches) perhaps best wafts the vertiginous translucency of Fitzgerald's work. In The Madness of the Day Maurice Blanchot writes, "Sometimes a vast solitude lay opened in my head and the entire world disappeared inside it, on the other hand came out again intact, without a scratch, with nothing missing." like could be the eye looking at Fitzgerald's paintings, falling into infinite deepnesss of light to be left at the extreme point with the afterimage of resplendence

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