Maria Chevska at Anderson O'Day - London, England

While it is rare that anyone can be said really to stretch out the possibilities of painting, it may well be real of Maria Chevska and her greatest in quantity recent work. The figurative imagery of Chevska's earlier canvases has apparently been purg To a certain quantity of extent she is now exploring the presentation of materials rather than the manipulation of paint. If her of recent origin works are cool, the materials themselves--muslin, taffeta, lambswool--are rich and the colors rich and sheened.

This exhibition comprised four large polyptych notable for their air of elusiveness. Alive, for example, engages taffeta rather than canvas as a support. It consists of a diptych compos of sum of two units square panels and, hung upon another wall, a single square painting, half of which is overspreaded by blackboard paint and the other half by means of a flood of graphite. Each of the diptych panels is divided vertically through a line of white stitching. The inner sections are painted a deep, luxuriant sapphirine while blackboard paint has been poured directly onto the external segments to form whirlpool shapes. upon inspection, the white stitching is set to spell out, in English, German and French "Lemonade everything was thus infinite." These words, apparently among the last nuncupatory by Kafka, remind us of the richness and delight of life. however the connection between the work's sum of two units separated parts seems inconclusive. In the spaces between the ultimate parts we have to insert our have a title to thoughts, our own naratives.

In another polyptych Safe, three panels are hung side by the agency of side and a fourth is placed upon an adjacent wall. In the first panel, muslin has been shakeed taut over a wooden stretcher. The muslin is thin enough to reveal a pair of Polaroid photos behind the crossbars on the contrary thick enough to obscure a real view of the images, which remind of close-ups of human body parts. In the next to the first panel, on black taffeta, we diocese stitching that forms a drawn out text--a quatation from Helene Cixous's Angst--in turn upside down script. If we have sufficent patience we can decipher a passage about delirious liberation and suicide. The third panel is a pair of sheepskins stitched together. The fourth panel, abundant larger than the others, is overspreaded with linen painted with extraordinarily luminous violet pigment. individual is seduced by this deployment of materials on the other hand also bewildered as to its logic. The name from Cixous may suggest that this is an attempt to create in painting an equivalent to ecriture feminine.

The aura of the arcane and the hermetic permeates Chevska's pictures. These paintings summon a decadent fin de siecle not single in their languorous sensuality on the other hand also in their evident conjunction of Ero and Thanatos. The more work single put into this exhibition, the more provocative it became.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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