The Cue Art Foundation Presents the Joan Mitchel Foundation – Gregory Amenoff
…Dylan reminds us, “it’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.” Ouch!
We now leave the metaphysics of psychic space for the metaphysics of objects and light – the real that the master metaphysician/painter Giorgio Morandi circumnavigated in the mid-twentieth century. Suzanne Walters provides us with a most mysterious feast of image and paint in her work, “iPod, High Horizon Line.” The mp3 player is posed as a muse replacing the vessel as a portentous object–brilliant! Yet this is no pop image. This is a slow, still painting. Even the earphone cord is languid, erotically twisting and turning over and around the soft rectangle of the device. The ubiquitous and the mundane have been elevated to poetry. Color and value are adjusted to the finest specifications and the paint is put to work to create surfaces that seduce and in some way even horrify. Politics can come in strange and unexpected costumes and Walters has found one such costume. In four of these artists, light carries much of the message ranging from the blank and banal light of Howard and Giocolea to the interior twilight of Schnell to the exterior twilight of Walters. The symbolists referred to the hour of twilight as being “entre chien et loup,” the hour between the dog and the wolf. I have always loved that expression and for both Schnell and Walters it seems to fit.
Suzanne Walters 