Patience and Care Engender
Paintings in Perpetual Motion



By Mario Naves



"Slow and seasoned": That's how a press release describes the paintings of Joanne Freeman on exhibition at Lohin Geduld Gallery. It's prudent to be wary of the promotional verbiage accompanying visual art. More often than not, words overstate the merits of the work or, as is typical in our post-Conceptualist age, attempt to establish a much needed justification. Yet "slow and seasoned" is just about right for Ms. Freeman's paintings. The phrase expresses, if not the core of the art, then much that is distinctive about it.

Ms. Freeman's pliant geometric abstractions are the antithesis of art that aspires to sound-bite status. They encourage the long look and reward it too. Ms. Freeman's process and materials foster the kind of deliberation necessary to focus and animate pictorial form: She arrives at each picture through the successive layering of stenciled patterning. Oil paint, a slow-drying medium, doesn't readily lend itself to this manner of working; it must require considerable patience. Otherwise, the crisp, taped edges and dense surfaces that Ms. Freeman favors would turn to mush. Chief among the ironies- and pleasures-inherent in Ms. Freeman's work is that the measured pace of its methods doesn't correspond with the speed of its effects. Though each composition is developed gradually, the paintings themselves are perpetual motion machines. They shake and shimmy, herk and jerk. They're all elbows, knees and jutting, propulsive rhythms. A Freeman painting will fold over and double back, like a piece of origami that continuously reinvents itself to the soundtrack of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

The constant in Ms. Freeman's vocabulary of form is a wedge that has been wrested into shape from the space surrounding it. It can be triangular, circular, rectangular or, as is often the case, an amalgam of the lot that she cobbles together. These wedges are distributed evenly across the canvas, packed and stacked. Each edge of the canvas is a sounding board off of which the shapes bounce. There isn't a square inch that isn't accounted for and energized.

Ms. Freeman loves the regularity of the grid that serves as the structuaral underpinning for her work-but she loves even more to call that regularity into question. What makes these steadfastly ordered pictures dance is their abrupt elisions of space, shape and rhythm. Even after you've become accustomed to the topsy-turvy juxtapositions of a particular painting, it continues to surprise. Ms. Freeman pulls off a hard feat: sustaining a rambunctious, bopping espirit.

A clear and grateful debt to high modernist abstraction is evident. The paintings are inconceivable without the examples furnished by Piet Mondrian, Paul klee, Bart van der Leck and closer to our own time, Ellsworth Kelly and Burgoyne Diller. A visitor to the gallery remarked upon the affinities Ms. Freeman's art shares with quilt making. I'd add that certain elements of vintage popular design-the bright and slightly synthetic palette, in particular-supply an undercurrent of campy good humor to the paintings.

Gathering together inspirational resources, Ms. Freeman stitches them into a distinctly personal vision. Her notion of forward momentum is to honor precedent even as she leapfrogs over it. Would that all the paintings did so with as much resilience and confidence as "Purple Galaxie" (2004) and the irresistible "Orange Duster" (2003). That doesn't mean the rest of the pictures, replete as they are with good tidings aren't worth looking at. That even the lesser achievments merit your time indicates the value of Ms. Freeman's unhurried efforts.

Joanne Freeman: Recent Work is at Lohin Geduld Gallery, 531 West 25th
Street, until Dec. 24.