Jacqueline Cotter at Hahn - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Like an overheard musical motif or an unexpect fragrance the images and calligraphic marks that fill Jacqueline Cotter's 34 shining new paintings transport one's contemplations to lost places and times. An abstractionist and colorist, cottager creates her own vocabulary using abstract, figurative and numeric ultimate parts while tipping her hat to an array of artists including Raoul Dufy and Robert Rauschenberg.

In her work of the past 15 years cottager has flirted with illustration without becoming either explanatory or obvious. She may use color to formally make her space, or she may exploit shape and color juxtapositions, as in the oil-on-canvas coming time Tears, to suggest buildings, canopy of heaven foliage and bodies of water. The surfaces of her works are now, as in the past, collage-like and parted In Bashful Blushes, a painting incorporating oil and sand, translucent white papers printed with irregular black marks in a configuration that advises a cat's paw are placed in a cantering pattern across the earthy brown ocher and pink paint. The titles of many paintings - Just in Time, Yesterday - call to mind the enigmatic flurries of nonsequential images evok by dint of music or poetry.

The greatest in quantity successful pieces in this display were found among the 26 mixed-medium works upon mylar, 14 of which are just 8 by means of 8 inches. In these smallest works Cotter's technique appear to bes most spontaneous and casual. oftentimes named for cities and towns, these are also her greatest in quantity representational images. Landscape is the inspiration for the close blues, greens and purples above an orange ground in February and Syracuse. Taos, upon the other hand, reads as a Matissean tabletop still life with a plant. In the larger, more compounded mylar works - many given ballad titles - she achieves time-lapse visual sensations. Her painting flutters both under and on top of scrawling marks, lines of hand-cut paper dolls and occasional photographic images. It is here that cottager is best able to refine her vision: the translucent overlapping, as a metaphor for the couple space and time, has not ever been so well used in her work.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group