Sidney Tillim at Tenri - painting exhibition; New York, New York

sum of two units groups of paintings executed ed in the last year and a half made up this exhibition. The earlier paintings are compos of layered rectangles of color that have three regular sides and a fourth that is either circulared or cropped at the corners. These rough randomly cut shapes are made through briefly pressing onto the canvas sheets of paper toweling which have been soaked in diluted acrylic of various colors. The towels are applied in loosely ordered, sometimes skewed, files The marks build up into a density that virtually nips out all evidence of the soil When tears or gaps meet the eye in the heavily soaked paper as it is being applied, the color residue of the previously used sheet is revealed.

In spite of the three or four relatively relatively bright colors in each work, I was eerily reminded of closely packed lines of cemetery markers that can be seen for instance, at Civil War battle sites, This martial association is supported by dint of titles such as Ironside and Wellington. on the contrary as if to challenge and contradict that line of interpretation, another work in the series is called My Favorite s Apparently the artist does not wish to confine the frame of mind or the meaning so narrowly!

The more new paintings abandon the idiosyncratic paper toweling for the traditional brush. in these works the canvas is shivered up into rectangles, each carefully outlined through a single black line and each containing stations of loosely brushed squares. While a faculty of perception of the grid persists, its regularity is undercut through the different sizes of these ultimate parts Each rectangular unit, in its various combinations of colors, makes a checkered pattern. Dopey in the Field of Dreams is divided into seven units. Here the checkered patterns are similar in size, on the other hand they vary a good deal in implied spatial profundity The dark-green squares in the upper - left unit appear to be to stretch in front of paler virid forms, while the grayed fulvous checks in the lower-left rectangle strike one as being to contest some white individuals for domination of the plane. In Days Like This the checkered patterns vie with individual another in size and scale while still, surprisingly, holding the same plane.

the one and the other groups of paintings are untie and spontaneous overall. In the checkered collection the brushstrokes are strongly evident notch and the paint runs freely in the assemblage made with paper toweling there is a comparable faculty of perception of ease and immediacy as the colors ble from one side each other and the layering of the imprints tympanums out a syncopated beat. the two groups of paintings, besides being different ways of organizing and breaking up the picture plane, communicate a lightness of touch and a feeling that is delicate and vulnerable. These configurations fix a fleeting trice in the life of forms in process

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