Shimmer and Shadow, Caught in Space

Jordan Wolfson is a talented painter who works primarily within the tradition of studio still lifes and interiors. Many canvases include a figure, often a female nude; others concentrate less on the objects in a room than on the spaces between them. His work is infused with a granular light that erodes edges, endowing each form with an atmospheric shimmer. The way light fills and enlivens empty space is his most consistent theme.A Southern California native, Mr. Wolfson lived and worked in Israel for 10 years. The last three were spent in a studio flooded with the light of Nataf, a small hill town between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He returned to Providence, R.I., in 2002, bringing with him memories of blinding Middle Eastern light and its splintering effect on objects in view. It was his carefully balanced rendering of an image — part optical, part conventional — that lay at the heart of the appeal of his previous show in 2005.This, his second solo show at DFN Gallery, introduces a dalliance with abstraction. It showcases the dissolution of forms in which real objects provide only a faint scaffolding, if that, for the act of painting. As Mr. Wolfson has said: “I’m painting; I’m making a painting. That’s really and finally just what I am doing.” It is a refreshing admission but one that skirts the differences in his achievement between depiction and the negation of it. This exhibition flirts with the presumption — increasingly retardataire — that decomposition of form is synonymous with progress over representation.On exhibit are several diptychs and triptychs dedicated to creating an image and then staging an about-face by “deconstructing” it. Two, three, or four paintings based on the same image appear next to each other; each replication is looser than the previous until the image liquefies altogether. In each series, his talent fulfills itself in the initial image; the second presents an attractive, if self-conscious, riff on itself. After that, visual reality veers into collapse.“Interior in Four Parts I” (2006) succeeds best as a series. The interior, a simple arrangement of three chairs, is beautifully handled, each rendition varied slightly by the changed position of a director’s chair in the foreground. A few pillows and a background plant provide color accents in the first three panels. In the last, all forms disperse in a golden cloud of fluid ochres; pictorial elements retain just enough contour to remain convincing. The first and the final panels are so lovely that they make superfluous the intermediate two, despite the integrity of all four as independent images.At his best, Mr. Wolfson approaches the human figure with a welcome regard for gesture and disposition that takes precedence over dry description. The blue-clad woman, face in shadow, of “Interior with Figure in Three States” (2007) is so delicately present in the first state that the fragmented later stage disappoints. The premier nude of “Woman Sitting in Two States” (2007) is a chaste presence. Her body is volumetric, luminous, and believably casual. The choppy dispersions of the second version, viewed at a slightly different angle, subtract from the initial accomplishment. Attentive viewers will wonder if the artist has been looking over his shoulder at his contemporary Ann Gale, for whom atomized depiction is a psychologically charged mother tongue, not a posture.“Still Life in Three States” (2008) displays the pitfalls of the artist’s after-the-fact effort to “reveal his thought processes.” Here is the traditional tabletop still life, more tightly rendered than Mr. Wolfson’s norm; then there is the pulverized post-impression, followed by an all-over soup that swallows everything but the brush mark. The particular grace of Mr. Wolfson’s hand is inexorably linked to his gift for depiction; with nothing to render, his brush is left pushing paint around.The gallery explained the artist’s current series by stating that “anyone who doesn’t understand abstraction can get it.” What’s to get? Abstract art originated in prehistory; it has been with us since primeval man scratched agreeable designs on the bones of his ancestors. Abstraction, as we moderns have come to know it, is largely an ideology. No virtue attaches to “getting it.” Mr. Wolfson’s alternation between coherence and contrived denial of it is a pose that puts him in danger of moving from depiction to dogma. He is too good to succumb to the creedal tropes of deconstruction.Until June 14 (210 Eleventh Ave. at 25th Street, 212-334-3400).

Shimmer and Shadow, Caught in Space

Shimmer and Shadow, Caught in Space

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