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| | Courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery | | | Out of the Blues
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De center holds
Easy and relaxed abstract pleasures hold sway in Melissa Meyer's seemingly lackadaisical layers of calligraphic intensity, density and transparency
By RACHEL YOUENS
Offoffoff.com
Known for her ability to combine lightness and monumental effect,
Melissa Meyer garners a range of aesthetic approaches from the abstract tradition. Masters such as Klee and Pollock come to mind as providing stylistic paradigms for Meyers, but she takes their respective vocabularies to a place of lyrical brevity.
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| MELISSA MEYER |
Exhibition: Recent Paintings.
Works by: Melissa Meyer.
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| SCHEDULE |
September 8 - October 8, 2005
Gallery: Elizabeth Harris
529 W 20th St., 6th floor
New York NY
Summer hours: Tue-Fri: 10-6
Regular hours: Tue-Fri: 10-6
Phone: (212) 463-9666
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While mid-twentieth century abstraction has served as a bedrock for Meyer, her painting style matured during the decades when feminist and postmodernist concerns were at the forefront of discussions about art. This context must have encouraged her to incorporate the notion of decentered experience into her paintings, thereby releasing them from the weight of her chosen tradition.
Meyer's approach expanded again a few years ago when she was commissioned to compose large murals in Japan to create a pair of atrium murals for Tokyo's newest skyscraper, the Shiodome City Center.
The palette of Meyer's paintings encompasses color harmonies of triads and quartets in blues, yellows, violets and occasional greens, which are enhanced by their autobiographical titles. With these tones, she emphasizes the frontality of the picture plane to lay warm washes across her canvases. These serve as grounds for mark making made with a broad brush. The pleasures of her paintings often take place through the interaction between these two layers with their interplay of density and transparency. Each of
her fairly large works, which explore a variety of proportions, is
subdivided into squarish compartments that read across and down from four to six or more areas, adding up to an effect of a quilted surface. The loose-knit seriality of her units is given variety through her hand as it wanders within each square and across, over and down. Thus Meyer's sequential renewal of smaller areas of squiggles and blobs tied across the surface of the canvas create the effect of luminous netting that spans across each painting.
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| | ...the immediacy and slight asymmetry of Meyer's classic painterly abstraction is heightened by an elevated if relaxed intensity. |
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Meyer's simultaneous control of local areas and drumlike surfaces
reaches a level of equilibrium that as if by coincidence, contributes to the overall unity of each work. The emotive tone of her units is one of lackadaisical intensity. The buoyancy of her marks is magnified by the moments when her peripheral vision is intact — they loop and meander with a sense of intentional wandering while they evoke a sophisticated primitivism. So that the immediacy and slight asymmetry of Meyer's classic painterly abstraction is heightened by an elevated if relaxed intensity.
It is as if by default that the accumulation of her unitary motifs which often bleed from their respective compartmental frames reach their desired destination. In "Garden at Villa" ultramarine blues merge in liquefied ripples across the uppermost layer, its heightened chroma creating density and intensity. When she works in a smaller scale in works such as "Out of the Blues" and "Amelie," her calligraphy breaks into clearings of deep translucent space. In this way Meyer's multifaceted relationship to the twentieth century avant-garde projects a sense of masterful ease. Her images multiply and divide optical and psychic experiences exponentially.
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OCTOBER 7, 2005
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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