2.7.24 — Extending the Dots
To pick up from last week on women in abstract art, you may have lingered a long time with Georges Seurat, but never over a single dot. Yet he did. How else to create the luminous color of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte), without a mathematical formula in his head or digital assistant by his side?
He brought the same precision and stillness to works on paper, trusting again to his hand and eye. Zipora Fried asks for your trust, too, as she extends his Pointillism to verticals, set side by side in the horizontal bands of her abstract art. One can imagine her counting off the thousands, at Sikkema Jenkins through February 3. 
Fried does not object to calling it painting, although she works not in oil, but in colored pencil on board. She is, after all, in a long tradition of translating precision into luminosity, from Jan van Eyck through Claude Monet, Georges Seurat and Sunday on the park with Georges, and beyond. Up close, you can hardly escape a mark’s physical presence. Standing back, you can still see colors mix within a single stroke, while relishing the glow. Bands may blend into a single field of changing color, like Monet’s late waterlilies without a dot in sight. You can see the work again when you get home, online, where one can easily mistake it for color-field painting, with poured paint on stained canvas.
Fried is not quite in their league, but then who is? Her compositions are as intuitive as her marks, and ceramics in black and white are more irregular still. When it comes down to it, the Israeli-born artist is still finding her way. I first caught her ten years ago on the Lower East Side, when she built color from triangular tiling, and again two years later with freestanding paintings descending to the floor, stained on both sides. Her first bands of color had the distinct fields of geometric abstraction, with verticals as thick as matchsticks. Now they gleam and flow.
Time is on her side within a work as well. Once again, Seurat’s dots have become verticals, each one taking time. Do not even think of counting. The bands encourage one to experience her work in time, from left to right, and many change color midway. One might contrast them with Seurat’s stillness, but they are still about color coming to be. They are large works at that in a large room, inviting one to step close and allowing one to step back.
They also suggest landscape, with their most memorable color a deep blue. Others introduce a forest green, like the “dark places” of Tariku Shiferaw. As one title has it, I Know My Way Through These Woods, and it is also a boast. “Whose woods these are, I think I know,” Robert Frost wrote, but forget the uncertainty of “I think.” I thought, too, of Dante “on the middle of life’s journey” and on the way to hell, “within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” What was lost may be found.
Fried shares the gallery with text painting by Kay Rosen, with its own certainty. For Glenn Ligon, an African American, text is curt and demanding, because so is America. For John Baldessari at Cal Arts, it is long on truisms and on the verge of making sense, because so is Postmodernism in LA. For Rosen, it denies the human hand while exploiting paint to send carefully mixed messages, and I leave a fuller account to a past review of her Chicago Minimalism. Still, anyone who partly blacks out a warning against censorship and writes HAT OMEN ANT has tricks up her sleeve. Women, it appears, want more than the letter W and the comforts of abstract art.
Landscape can take Fried only so far. The lowest color field might be a fiery red or yellow, as if unable to burn into the sky. Again, the point is the emergence of color in abstract art. How do ceramics fit the picture? Even now, I am not sure, but long black drips in their white glazing have a parallel in her handmade verticals, while here, too, shapes hint at representation rooted in abstraction—from urns and architecture to missile heads and weary bodies. In a show subtitled “Jubilation and Melancholia,” they may serve as a chastening reminder of the melancholy.
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