OPINION
A Call-and-Response of Color and Light at Spanierman

By Janet Goleas

(05/08/2007) “It’s the quality of the light,” said Helen Spanierman, adjusting her turquoise glasses. “That’s why artists have always come here.” After 31 years on the East End, Ms. Spanierman has come to know something about the artistic climate here. But changes are afoot at Spanierman Gallery, evidenced by the season opener, “Six East End Artists.” Curated by the longtime gallerist Arlene Bujese, the exhibit includes work by the contemporary artists Priscilla Heine, Alexander Russo, David Geiser, Josh Dayton, Carol Hunt, and Stephanie Brody-Lederman. One could argue that each has been inspired in some way by that much-discussed light, which refracts off the ocean and surrounds us.

Ms. Spanierman pointed to a small painting next to her desk. “I have a good eye,” she said. “This painting is all about light.” The work of Priscilla Heine, it is bathed in it. Brilliant pools of color, attenuated lines, and bright swaths of loose, buttery paint dance across Ms. Heine’s canvases. The use of straight white pigment, in particular, lends a sun-drenched aura, as if the artist had just returned from the Greek Isles.

Ms. Heine’s paintings are lively, even madcap, almost sparkling in their freshness. In “The Conversation” (2006), she loops around the canvas with saturated brushes, defining areas of calm and chaos, weaving through slathered layers of color and scalloped charcoal lines, creating a visual sonata.

By contrast, Alexander Russo’s paintings are ethereal and diaphanous; they slip in and out of objectivity. In “Biogenesis,” he sprayed layer upon layer of cerulean blue and lively green pigment across a canvas square. The resulting image is plantlike and slightly scientific, but infused with a flatness that is graphic, minimal, and
abstract. In “Process V,” Mr. Russo flirts with representation, stopping just shy of identifying what appear to be the windows of a modest stucco building — or perhaps not. Diffuse and mysterious, these paintings defy easy classification.

Just at the edge of David Geiser’s studio in Springs a giant forsythia is in full bloom. “I’m using bright-yellow swaths of paint, completely unadulterated,” he said. “I call it Arles-yellow.” (A reference by this inveterate New Yorker to the effect the countryside had on another painter, Vincent Van Gogh.) One could say that Mr. Geiser is equal parts alchemist and artist. His work is steamy. It smolders as if a flame has just been doused.

In “Gold Cenote” (2007), spillages of loose paint are splayed across a random grid of accreted gold leaf, blistered pigment, and thick layers of varnish. Explosive and churning, the action here is circumscribed by a ring of translucent amber that delineates the tumult and reins it in. Mr. Geiser’s art pays homage not just to big ideas — ideas that have moved cultures forward or defined the human psyche — but to small ones, as well. Here he has referenced the cenotes, sacred Mayan watering holes, found in the Yucatan. Inside these mysterious limestone caverns massive stalactites hover above pools of crystal-clear drinking water and jungles of undergrowth. The caves, prized by the ancients far beyond their ability to nourish, became religious and ceremonial sites. Mr. Geiser’s works seem to breathe the same thick air. His paintings are as elegant as they are scrappy, as if the markings of his divine ring could be evidence of the supernatural or simply the residue of a huge coffee cup.

Josh Dayton has examined the divergent mediums of collage and ceramics. Wildly opposite in many ways, their shared interior logic has been connected and exposed by his artist’s hands. In “Squeeze” (2004), Mr. Dayton has manipulated squashy slabs of clay that have been vaguely imprinted with floral patterns. The fleshy forms, assembled atop a horseshoe-shaped base, are largely unidentifiable, knowable chiefly by their adherence to sculptural conventions. The artist’s large-format collages are slightly more subversive, even drastic in their approach to image-making. Associations to Henri Matisse’s cutouts are, of course, inevitable, and Mr. Dayton does share some of the master’s sense of fullness and alacrity; but his collages are more strenuous and far less concerned with bliss. Mr. Dayton’s exude a lush severity, a netherworld atmosphere. A dry brush wafted across paper creates breathy, skeletal forms. In his most successful pieces — “Wide Open” (2006), for example, or the stunning monotypes in the downstairs gallery — there is an active switchback at play, with the artist vigorously moving between opposites: fat and lean, foreground and background.

“Lyric pandemonium” might best describe Carol Hunt’s abstract paintings and drawings. They radiate something that is centered and yet at the same time utterly crazy — a visual Zen of Bedlam.

In “Pastel 14” (2006), a work on paper, she has marked the surface with buoyant, gestural strokes that hover in mid-air as if suspended in time. She pushes and pulls charcoal across the surface, identifying a line here, stopping to examine a corner there.

Similarly, in the painting “Morning Music” (2007), she cavorts across the rectangular canvas with wild strokes of paint, a mixture of caprice and ferocity. Clearly aroused by musicality, Ms. Hunt has achieved a sort of harmonic convergence. She functions like the soul sister of Vasily Kandinsky, whose radical abstractions, many inspired by music, helped usher in the rise of nonobjective painting.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman makes poetry from the random words and images that infiltrate our senses, tickle and accost us, oversaturate us with pictures, and ultimately become the symbols and fragments of our days and nights. Her particular brand of cryptography is especially poignant, linking the words and deeds that might bob to the surface from a longstanding inside joke.

In “Only Paris” (2006), she bisects the canvas with double orange orbs that slide into view from left and right. They are like Creamsicle islands, one with a fragile tree sprouted from its base, the other lying in the foreground like the edge of a tongue depressor. Much of her paintwork is cracked and mottled, as if time had gotten the best of it.

Many artists use words or alphabets. It’s not an easy thing to do, and it is often done badly. But Ms. Brody-Lederman has an uncanny knack of making use of both the abstract qualities of the written word and the substantive and specific romance of language itself. She pluckily plants her words like tiny landmines across the canvas.
In “Only Paris,” the words are inscribed in a frenzied scrawl — she has scratched them out, written them again — even on the wooden margins of her frame. It is as if thought itself were coalescing before our eyes. While these works are charged with the ironies of modern thinking, they are also tender, and they will make you smile.

The exhibit continues at the Spanierman Gallery, 68 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, through May 28.

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