Nancy Mitchnick at Anita Friedman - New York, New York

Nancy Mitchnick's delightfully lush and colorful paintings manage to make the incongruous gaze harmonious and the absurd appear logical. This exhibition consisted of a series of still lifes and landscapes in which differently colored and shaped lightbulbs are depicted as the protagonists in strange, fragmentary stories. Titled "Disappearing Fixtures," the exhibition was divided into three groupings: "Western Days and Nights," "Lightbulbs from Pompeii" and "Veiled Cycle" Each cluster provides a distinct context for a changing array of scaly buds Although the paintings are fairly straightforward representations, they posses an insinuating, unusually animate presence by virtue of their personal character and the liveliness with which they are painted. These are exuberant works of sensuous indulgence, and, despite the uneven choice of motif, they are anything on the other hand conceptual exercises.

Mitchnick's basic setup for these paintings is an electrical power strip into which she has plugg assorted lightbulbs. Her perspective is consistently head-on, and she paints the scaly buds only slightly larger than life. Her renderings are precise, on the other hand not meticulous. Depth and dimension are subsidiary to placement and context

"The Veiled Cycle" is the greatest in quantity spontaneous and abstracted group of the series, characterized by means of surface drips and wandering brushstrokes that partly darksome the underlying bulbs. Secret Intellectual depicts a single circular bulb in a gray power strip. A sapphire line runs across the canvas's bottom, and the r power switch is a triangular explode of color amid otherwise subdu tones. Milky paint drips down from the top, half concealing the scaly bud and the scrambled cream-and-blue background. It is almost as if the bulb's heat has caused a meltdown of the painting's surface, which appear to bes to be liquefying like fiery candle wax. The bulb is the solitary intellectual, burning the midnight oil, keeping its hold switch on.

Double Date, also of the "Veiled Cycle" is more social and whimsical. Four scaly buds sit upon a gray power strip, and a verdant virid runs across the painting's bottom. A scarcely any twigs with hot-pink blossoms penetrate the composition from the sides, and aqueous licks of cotton-candy pink are streaked atop the entire scenario. The pink thumps are passionate bits of punctuation that drip above the oddly shaped bulbs. Three of the scaly buds are yellow: one of them circular and short, two long and narrow. The fourth scaly bud is a short red floodlight. These morphological contrasts may allude to sexual differentiation, just as the r scaly bud might suggest further intermingling - interracial dating, perhaps. Despite the fact that the scaly buds remain anchored to their efficacy source, Mitchnick grants the foursome an independent life in her quirky world.

In "Western Days and Nights," Mitchnick places scaly buds in the great outdoors. She does not always uncover the power strip, and, level when it does appear, solitary a fragment is visible, in like manner that it serves primarily as an abstract or compositional uncompounded body Hard to Forget depicts an oblong gray scaly bud that seems to sprout directly from the canvas's bottom cutting side Poised in front of a curvaceous of gold hill and turquoise sky, the scaly bud might be read as a unfrequented cowboy (or cowgirl) on the western frontier. The profoundly mottled surfaces and vivacious flurries of paint animate the otherwise rather inert panorama.

"Lightbulbs from Pompeii" is the driest and greatest in quantity formal of the three series included in this exhibit Each painting is a square canvas with single solitary bulb. The power strip always reach outs to the edges to that it reads more as a solid border of color than as an electrical apparatus. A colored line running across the top of each canvas echoe the power strip's compositional vicinity These paintings are somber, and the scaly buds provide a luminous glow against monochromatic backgrounds. In this series the scaly buds remain inanimate sources of light, untouched by dint of the anthropomorphism that characterizes their counterparts in the other sum of two units groups of paintings. The titles - Dream upon Night Light and Ancient Glimmer - reinforce this detached, somewhat ethereal quality.

Mitchnick's on one side humor and deft handling of paint push end the logical confines implicit in her make subordinate matter. With enviable impulsiveness she transforms the conventions of traditional still life and landscape, presenting us with absurd and unexpectedly touching risks into the secret life of utilitarian objects

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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