8.2.24 — Holding in the Light
A typical summer show of a Lower East Side’s gallery’s roster had me fooled, at Magenta Plains through August 16. A curtain of white sweeps across an abstract canvas as if in motion, only to fall beneath before a more colorful field that gives the whole a greater sense of structure and care. It took a moment to see the artist’s characteristic verticals in a divided surface. Let me then, if I may, present a review of her work earlier this year that somehow never made it online.
When Jane Swavely calls a painting Silver OID, silvery it is. It does not need metallic paint or glitter, just oil on canvas to shine. It does not need shifting reflections as one’s eye crosses its surface or one’s body walks beside.
It attains that sense of visual and material substance with paint alone, the brush carrying pools of white as it will, covering and mixing with gray. It looked back to a time when painting pretty much meant painting in oil, for its ability to lend depth to a flat surface by holding in the light, through February 24—and I work this in with other recent reports on recovering women in abstraction as a longer review and my latest upload.
Not that everyone back in the day needed oil. Enamel and industrial paint were good enough for Jackson Pollock now and then, for their shine and low cost, but then he also threw in cigarette butts and coins. Still, Swavely looks back, in her scale and commitment to abstract art as well. Paintings can run up to ninety inches high, and the sixth in the series is ninety inches square. She likes how large paintings are that much more visual and material.
That version looks to a different postwar artist, too. A broad stripe descends the full height of the painting, much like “zips” for Barnett Newman. Swavely is thoroughly contemporary, and her paintings are brand new, but then the Jewish Museum has argued for Newman’s relevance to art today. Her zip, like his, cannot so easily stick to the edge or center of the canvas. Here its right edge falls just to the right of center. Still, it has fluid edges, much as Newman sometimes allowed his brush to show in a zip while keeping the background color seemingly untouched.
Hold on, though, for she is not just reworking the past. Blacks lend depth to that deep red vertical, much as whites lend silver to gray. The stripe is also more than a foot wide, like brushstrokes for David Reed, and another painting devotes roughly its left half to much the same rust and blood red. One could almost see the halves in collision, were the boundary not so loose and permeable. One could almost see the gray as background, were the brushwork on both halves or within the larger silver field and the stripe not so much the same. Other paintings defy the very thought of a zip, as one rich color climbs the right edge and crosses over the top.
They may look as if they date to the 1950s, but Swavely ls not history. Born in 1959, she has long exhibited with A.I.R., the women’s collective in Dumbo. Just starting out, she assisted Brice Marden and Lois Lane at that. One can see Marden’s equation of monochrome color fields with drawing in her abstract painting—and Lane’s New Image painting, like that of Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg, in her refusal of purity. The material nature of paint here is just that, a step into this world, not a higher calling. She might cringe at Newman’s “The Sublime Is Now.”
She fits with the present interest in overlooked women in abstraction, although she has exhibited regularly since the 1980s. She may still seem to fall between generations or run across them. Yet her work is a powerful alternative to the “everything goes” version of the revival of painting or, for that matter, to the zip. Past shows have presented a still greater depth, using dark, resonant colors with elusive outlines. There, too, she insists on that visual and material substance. It carries her from deep red against silver to color climbing the wall.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.