I recently went to see Cornelia Thomsen's one-woman show, entitled Strokes, that's currently on view at the Leslie Feeley Gallery on East 68th Street. On arrival, I found that there are actually two distinct genres of abstract art on display. The first consists of vertical lines, or stripes, painted with oil on canvas while the second are pen and ink drawings on paper.
I had previously seen samples of earlier stripe paintings by the artist and found the new works much more interesting and accessible. While the earlier works contained more color, the stripes were too crowded together for my taste, almost like the slats of a fence; and, like a fence, they almost forcibly pushed the viewer back and allowed him no entry to the artist's imaginative world. The newer works, in contrast, appear at first monochromatic and create a much different psychological effect. Rather than holding one back, these paintings impress one as multi-lane roadways that lead the viewer ever forward. But that's not to say they are as straightforward as they first appear, nor for that matter are they completely monochromatic. When one looks closely, one can see that these are not simple flat lines laid down in a single stroke. In fact, they are made up of many layers of paint that have been painstakingly applied, pointillist style, in infinitesimal brushstrokes, thus allowing for shadowing as well as a slight blurring (or "feathering," to use a term taken from digital imaging) of the edges. These, combined with a variety of different colored pigments, together give the paintings more depth, and thereby greater meaning, and render them almost three dimensional. This can be seen most clearly in the pairing Stripes Nr. 102+103, which I consider the most successful of the paintings shown.
In the catalog's erudite introductory essay by Robert C. Morgan, the writer references the Bauhaus as the source of Ms. Thomsen's approach to art. I myself would go slightly further back to the De Stijl movement (which itself, of course, exerted tremendous influence on the development of the Bauhaus aesthetic). Certainly, the paintings shown here conform perfectly to Mondrian's dictum, as set forth in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art," that natural form and color should be disregarded in favor of "abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour." While Ms. Thomsen's style is entirely her own, to me there exists a definite affinity between her work and that of such De Stijl artists as Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart and Vilmos Huszár.
The second category of work shown at the exhibit, that of the pen and ink drawings, differs greatly from the paintings in both content and style. They share, however, the artist's intense attention to detail. The tiny cross-hatched lines of which the drawings are composed have been meticulously drawn with an old fashioned nib pen on BFK Rives paper so that the final work has more the appearance of a mezzotint than that of a drawing. The lines combine to form great swirling patterns that attract the viewer's gaze and hold his attention. Some, such as Drawing Nr. 37 and Drawing Nr. 44, are so light as to be almost ephemeral, while at the opposite end of the spectrum is Drawing Nr. 10, so dark that it can only be described as brooding; it contains within it a palpable air of foreboding. In fact, when looking at this last work, I was reminded quite strongly of Leonardo's late series of Deluge drawings, not so much for its technique as its overwhelming sense of doom.
Viewing abstract art is always problematical. As much as figurative or landscape art, it demands a reaction from the viewer, but one lacking the visceral response to content necessarily associated with representational art. With little to guide him or her, the viewer is instead called upon not only to make a determination as to the meaning of the work but also to the artist's purpose in creating it. In order to know what to make of it, the viewer is thus required to become more deeply involved with an abstraction and to study it more closely than would be the case with a work of representational art. The danger, of course, is that the viewer will impose his own interpretation on the work at hand rather than allow the artist's intention to make itself manifest.
The exhibit continues through December 15, 2016.
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