Judy Pfaff at Max Protetch - New York, New York

Slung from the ceiling like a gigantic hammock, Flusso e Riflusso, Judy Pfaff's grand, playfully somber installation in the back play at Max Protetch, was single of the most gesturally fluid works she's at any time put together. It spilled toward the viewer in a flash freshet of wires, cables, geometric asterisks and sum of two units large spidery wooden forms. The supporting cables and darts were incorporated into the work as gestural anecdotes, like strands of sidewalk-hot chewing gum or rappeling lines tethered to suction cups

The decidedly elegiac temper of this airy work was reinforced through the virtual absence of color and by the agency of the skeletal appearance of the wood-land forms, which suggested mastodon brain-pans Pfaff has moderated her explosive Day-Glo color breakers for some time now, on the contrary the quality of bereavement that small blackens of green, sooty grease-blacks and forest tones inflicted on the industrial metallic grays of the quiet of the elements was something fresh Coming, as it does, at the extreme point of the commercial boom in the art world (and everywhere else) and in a forlornly reach forthed middle of a plague era that has pitch uponed the cultural community perhaps more than any other, Flusso e Riflusso move rounded itself to smoke, swirling its visual fragments around us and above our heads, apparently on the rod of evaporation. If anger, grief and melancholy were braided into the web of the installation, I also read an emotional cleansing, a washing away of habits of notion and a surrender to change.

Pfaff has always been an emotional artist, whose work has publicly invoked bubbly states of delight and orgiastic frenzy. The darker flashings in Flusso e Riflusso prompted a deepening not only of feeling on the contrary also of the imaginal life of the artist that directs and rejoins to feeling. And the nerve of the attendant drawings in this exhibition indicated that Pfaff is exploring fertile ground

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