[ Metro | Metroactive Central ]

Abstract Highs

Emergency Clause #4:
Graphite on canvas by Judy Foosaner

Line dancing and organic shaping
in the paintings of Judy Foosaner
and Roberta Eisenberg

By Ann Elliott Sherman

Loath as any jaded denizen of the galleries might be to admit it, one submerged impetus for bothering to see art in the flesh is just the same need for deliverance that drives a junkie or evangelical fanatic. Whether you find it or not in the two solo abstract shows now on view at d.p. Fong Galleries in downtown San Jose, as with any potentially mind- or mood-altering experience, is highly subjective.

The amazingly assured grace of Judy Foosaner's subtly complex line paintings produced a real high; Roberta Eisenberg's mellow, biomorphic abstracts, however, smoothed all the holy roller out of that old-time religion.

Foosaner's work here is all in black, white and gray oil on wood or canvas, or charcoal/paper on canvas in varying degrees of spareness or density. About Ado is one of the more austere pieces, with a black semidiagonal line that meanders into gently curving tributaries here, is crosshatched with "stitches" there. Foosaner blurs the line by thinly washing it, until it's like a fading but still visible scar across the smooth skin of white-painted wood. Her work is as much about what is taken away as what is added.

This subtractive approach is especially apparent in the dense thicket of dark and lifted charcoal lines that give Courante an intense, barely contained energy. You don't so much look at this piece as become submerged in its crosscurrents. In Trespass #1 and #2, Foosaner has taken cut swatches of Courante-like lines and erasures and pieced them together into a flat patchwork quilt placed on canvas. What was once a flow with its own logic becomes a herky-jerky pastiche of rhythms--kind of interesting but like mowing your prize flower bed to see how the petals fall.

Foosaner flies with the angels when she stops fighting the feeling, and her defiance of gravity is catching. The ghosted lines of Tailgate have a subtle, released radiance. Flight Instructions is an apt handle for a painting that swoops and arcs, angling just enough to keep the cloudlike surface from evaporating into the ether. As with the best contemporary dance, we don't stop to ask why the movement is there, but feel glad to witness an assured athleticism, a confluence of the physical and spiritual that we aren't practiced at attaining.

Eisenberg paints the kind of abstracts associated with the precursors of action painting, where abstracted natural or organic forms float free of context. Her colors are occasionally surprising, as when a touch of violet or salmon pink rises out of a greenish black in an untitled work.

Surprising or not, the hues are almost always pleasurable. In Big Red, a piece vaguely reminiscent of pioneer abstract painter Arthur Dove, somber gray and sage greens harmonize with vivid coral and peach tones.

Eisenberg is an intelligent painter but doesn't give attitude. She knows when to put something in a space and when to leave it alone, when to paint a shape and when to merely intimate with a brush stroke.

The manic gestures of her earlier work, according to curator Jane Salvin, has mellowed and smoothed out. This evolution is both refreshing, and frankly, a little ho-hum. It's like hearing stories about an acquaintance's stormy life before Prozac--you want to give her credit for getting it together but secretly feel that you'd have liked her better before she calmed down. There is something just a trifle too controlled about these paintings to stir up a pronounced reaction, for all their accomplishment.

Deliverance can come in a form that is counterintuitive--intense grief has sent more than one woman I know straight to a dance floor; the upper registers of Emmylou Harris' plaintive voice can salve an agitated mood.

Eisenberg's seasoned balance of rich color and form might logically trigger transcendence for some; but Foosaner's spare, achromatic works, quirky blends of the dissonant and lyrical, of shadow and light, left this ragged soul strangely exalted.

---

Judy Foosaner and Roberta Eisenberg run through Nov. 25 at d.p. Fong Galleries, 383 S. First St., San Jose. (408/298-8877)


---

[ Metro | Metroactive Central ]