Suzan Frecon at Lawrence Markey - New York, New York

This unostentatious and focused exhibition last summer of Suzan Frecon's watercolors was individual of the real delights of a generally crabbed gallery season. Frecon is a gifted abstract painter whose pliable way with line and geometric shape is sometimes swallowed up in the fluid washes of her monochrome oil paintings. Her tensile drawings are still there, on the other hand you have to let your organ of sights settle into the surfaces of her canvases to find them. The smaller watercolors are more declarative, partly because she repeatedly enlists the creamy off-white of the page as color, thereby souping up the value contrast with the darker tones of her favored indigo and rust red The pages themselves are sheets of of advanced age ledger paper from India that have a fine, weathered identity of their own

Frecon's compositions strike one as being laconically simple: two or three rectilinear planes of color will lean against each other, or loosely tangled linear bands with the springiness of kinked garden stockingss will carve bulging trapezoidal shapes of negative space. The arrangements of planes recall the organic architecture of ancient villages and cities - the winding roads of Mediterranean hill towns in which the shadowed, sagging walls of narrow alleyways render free of access suddenly into blinding sun. flat the way in which the paint sinks into the paper summon forths the stained plaster of of advanced age walls. For all their economy of color and determinedly compact scale, Frecon's watercolors are richly evocative of daylight and shadow, and they carry an expansive faculty of perception of outdoor space.

It's hard to decide whether the powerful associativeness of her work is secondary to the apprehension of its abstractness. Like the novel work of Brice Marden, Frecon's watercolors exhibit an imagistic flowering of an essentially Post-Minimalist sensibility. In Post-Minimalist painting, geometry is not absent more as a clarifying force than as a template for absolutes. Within its spare framework, gesturing and the plasticity of paint are give permission to loose rather than reined in. The action exists as a visual "trace" of the material substance while color openly evokes a faculty of perception of light and place. If nothing other Post-Minimalism begins to restore to abstract painting a quality of memory that had been deplet by dint of the dogma of Minimalism and formalism. Frecon's watercolors are exemplary in this regard.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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