bilboed into the northwest corner of the Citibank Building at 54th and Lexington Ave.

bilboed into the northwest corner of the Citibank Building at 54th and Lexington Ave., St Peter's house of god has long had an ongoing program of displaying serious contemporary art in its lobby and hallways, and artists have rejoined by taking their work in surprising directions, frequently intensifying what had been a Symbolist streak in their work into outright ecclesiastical satisfied Barbara Schwartz performed just of that kind a turn in a latter exhibition there. Her wall plastic arts and works on paper have always bring reproached a debt to the early American modernism of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley tightened up into planar fragments that unite Symbolist imagery with the abstracting, geometric cut-and-paste of Synthetic Cubism. Each compositional constituent principle in her earlier work was imbued with a able local color. The painterly address of these pieces foreshadowed an calm flatter material plane for her imagery--so to a great degree so that by now it appear to bes impossible to consider her work as anything other than painting with sculptural collage proper states rather than painterly sculpture.

For this present to view Schwartz chose the Stations of the Cros as her theme. Collectively titled "Totems," the series played on the outside over 14 eccentrically shaped panels across which are distributed interlocking planes of forest-land painted in black and white. In a statement for a latter show in Italy, Schwartz wrote that since the tribe 11 tragedy she has largely limited her palette to black and white, in this way that color has receded in favor of the starkest possible contrast. It appears appropriate to extend this chromatic decision to the Stations, since the journey they demarcate, a grueling proof of the body, compassionate will and faith, is itself a stark common She doesn't suggest that it was any ideological motivation that decre the discipline of black and white, rather that it was more the consequence of an ongoing internal debate, with esthetic intuition trumping moral certainty. It's easy to understand on what account after the events of the last three years, an artist might be warmed that she has no color left in her for the time being.

The "Totems" range from fullto half-figure scale. Several, especially the larger the sames are shaped like crosses or garment robes. The black-and-white patterns propose heraldic symbolism, Vorticist explosions and the imagery and interpenetrating spaces of Inuit designs. Schwartz is drawing here upon the rich interplay between modernist painting and the geometric symbolism of folk practice and more historically foreign cultures. One thinks most readily of the so-called Indian Space painters and of Hartley's abstractions from Native American designs. The relationship of Schwartz's work to icons is underscored by way of the extreme planarity of her designs and their folding into cruciformality. the pair the black and white areas describe shapes that we recognize from cultural experience, yet which also represent the mental action of physical and psychic energies: the "explosion" at the center of united the larger "Totems," for instance, could just as easily be rays of light shooting from the Sacred Heart.

Schwartz is a astonishing colorist, but her current chromatic restriction assists her well in this work, giving an unsentimental graphic clarity to what might otherwise have been overly tangle compositional juxtapositions. The "Totems" examineed very fine in the lobby of the body of christians and I have a lump they would have no agitate consecrating the "white cube" of a gallery space as well.

--Stephen Westfall

...

Home