Art in Brief
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MARGARET NEILL: CIRCUIT
Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art
Margaret Neill is an abstract painter who sets herself the rigors that many painters turn to abstraction to avoid. She works within clearly defined contours and reaches for a spatial complexity that is more often the domain of representation than of abstraction. Her first exhibition at Cheryl Pelavin is poised, accomplished, and welcome.
Although Ms. Neill begins intuitively, with no prearranged sketches or plan, there is nothing accidental in the result. Undulating organic and ovoid shapes float across the canvas, billowing or narrowing like magnified ripples on the face of a pond. The canvas edge stops our view of liquid motions that glide over each other, headed beyond the confines of a rectangular frame.
“Vantage” (2006), typical of Ms. Neill’s most compelling compositions, suggests captured motion, driftage fixed for an instant in passing. Lateral movement is enriched by planar depth achieved by the optical blending of layered colors scraped over the underlying design. Multiple symmetries are kept from redundan cy by shifts in weight and transparency. Her color is modulated with refined precision; each plane cuts crisply into another.
The rhythmic subtleties of “Circuit” (2007) are entrancing. A central core of softened orange eddies downward into a pink swell that embraces the pale violet penumbra of a darkened zone of shifting, variegated greens. At the same time, the central warmth rolls upward into a divided complement of blues and blue greens. A striated, downward scumble of contrasting hues softens linear edges and veils each color segment in a harmonizing mist of intermediate tones. It is a lovely performance.
“Wink” (2007) is the most dramatic composition on view. A play of pastels carve their way out of a black void in a structure that resembles the crosscut view of a botanical drawing. A clear cadmium red fills an off-center axis that rises from the void like the stamen of a lily. Here, spatial interest surrenders to graphic flourishes spread across the same plane.
A series of three mixed-media works on paper could almost be by someone else. Here, gestural forms go wiggly, slackening Ms. Neill’s distinctive control. But press on to the back room to see the imposing “Jag” (2007) and two small canvases that rhyme with the finely graded color and defined current of the larger painting.
Until June 16 (13 Jay St., between Hudson and Greenwich streets, 212-925-9424).
