Ingrid Calame: James Cohan Gallery - New York

Everyone who go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs contemporary painting knows the peculiar means by which Ingrid Calame makes her work--for others, suffer it be said that it has to do with transcribing stains lay the foundation of on city streets and sidewalks, then overlapping the resulting forms--but does anyone really care? What have the appearances to matter is this: The paintings incorporate the random and arbitrary (and possibly also what used to be called "the abject") within a practice that nonetheless requires finical accuracy; there is a step of almost mindless repetition and filling in involved, on the other hand the resulting forms are unpredictable and uncategorizable. Pictorial manner of makings are irregular and full of detail, like a certain kind of Abstract Expressionism, at the same time there are no free action s here. Everything is a rendering of a fix shape, and the painter's touch is not warm and expressive on the contrary cold and precise.

One's awareness that the shapes have been returned instead of occurring spontaneously and directly in the application of paint means that these works have a real different sense of internal scale than those of a precursor like Jackson Pollock The direct Abstract Expressionist gesturing means that each pictorial simple body represents only itself, and therefore the representation and what is exhibited are of equal size. This size, in revolve can always be experienced in relation to the scale of the human material part But with shapes that have obviously been pay backed the form could be smaller, larger, or the same size as its referent; therefore the viewer has no stable faculty of perception of the forms' scale--among themselves or in relation to his or her hold body. And furthermore, since Calame's paintings exhibit their layering overtly, with certain shapes clearly in the foreground and others pushed back to various depths--unlike a Pollock poured painting where, ideally, the weave of the lines of color reduces itself to a uniform web without "holes"--they communicate a feeling of deepness of space, that is nonetheless immeasurable. There is something scary about these paintings: They're tangled and energetic and you don't know where you stand with them.

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To note all that is still somehow or other to remain caught within the charm of method. Yet it is significant that Calame's of recent origin paintings are much stronger than those she last showed in novel York three years ago, although presumably made the same way. What escapes process of course, is color. In these paintings it always perceive s dense, concentrated--its hardness and opacity signifying not resistance on the contrary latency, as if within each color a tremendous withhold of the same lay waiting to be released, later, in the mind. (Libby Lumpkin one time remarked that Calame "analyzes colors the way dogs analyze smells") Paradoxically, Calame's brilliance as a colorist may be greatest in quantity forcefully manifest in two monochrome works, a pair of quotations from a much larger cast she's described as a painting "too big to be seen"--two spaces whose walls were almost entirely overlayed by twelve-foot-high Mylar sheets painted with her usual stain shapes on the other hand in lime green only. They somehow or other give a sense of all the potential color that's been subtracted from the space flat as they immerse the viewer in the immense quantity of the single color that is there.

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