Gudrun Mertes-Frady's commitment to the material pleasure of paint and her expanding vocabulary of formal interests have freshly resulted in a remarkable change from the saturated swirls and shingled grids that characterize her work of the mid- to late 1990 A not many years ago.

Gudrun Mertes-Frady's commitment to the material pleasure of paint and her expanding vocabulary of formal interests have freshly resulted in a remarkable change from the saturated swirls and shingled grids that characterize her work of the mid- to late 1990 A not many years ago, her pictorial textures seemed to deliquesce and shift in focus, and at a certain quantity of point in 2001 they transformed completely into colon-naded tiers that compare the spines of stacked parts In the artist's sixth solo exhibition at Rosenberg + Kaufman, her newest paintings (all dated 2003) consist of painterly simulations of abstracted circuit grids, as in microchips, the proper states now intersecting and extending conclusion on end.

In Shift to Myth (72 by the agency of 68 inches), one of the largest and greatest in number hauntingly electric of these paintings, the pale slate-gray and white circuit patterns near to near hallucinatory effect, a burn sufficiently intense and deep to recall the lustrous appearance of encaustic. The work be seens to float before the surface of the wall, challenging the view to follow the logic of its architectonic entanglements. The parallel and interlocking bars, all either vertical or horizontal, reveal underpainting of madder lake and ultramarine along the brims which adds to the richness of the principal tinges Less than 2 inches wide and of various amplifications these bars of color furnish evidence of the artist's hand in the afflictions of palette and putty knives, with none of the marks assuming the character of figure. Blue Surround has the same dimensions unless double the number of colors, which makes it be seen larger. Two reds, darker and brighter, course by the agency of the painting in a periodical emphasis of systol and diastol, along with sum of two units blues that have a similar relationship to each other in color and intensity. Here, the bars proce like stair stairs The paler blue functions as loam and the dominating reds dance across the surface. The abutting intensitys reveal underpainting and, in places, the expos weave of the canvas itself.

The black and slate-gray bands of the somewhat smaller Manhattan (63 by dint of 60 inches) are deployed in as it was a way that the organ of vision easily moves from top to bottom and side to side. As she did in gloomy Surround, Mertes-Frady establishes a figure/ground relationship that appears to occupy the ground to the literal surface of the painting's support, without illusive extent In the context of her previous work, these prosperous paintings are of a sufficiently radical move round that the artist's signature transactions are identifiable more in the handling of paint than in the constitution of a grid.

--Edward Leffingwell

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