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5/3/2002

Julie Evans

Cheryl Pelavin, New York

Festoon is an exhibition of recent abstractions by painter Julie Evans which includes an eponymous series of square panels, her signature format. In these new paintings, she felt compelled to transform ungainly "blobs" and "humble forms" into objects of beauty. It's the flip side of her previous show at Cheryl Pelavin; then she willed beauty to emerge as blemishes. In those earlier works, the decorative flourishes, in particular the polka dot - an important motif for her since 1997 - pockmarked the surface or erupted from beneath like a "disease," a metaphor, perhaps, for the notion that beauty and its opposite are inextricably linked. Evans, who recently went to India, fell in love with a country where the urge to ornament seemed as natural and necessary as breathing. She was deeply moved by the local art, particularly the impromptu shrines that seemed to be everywhere. They were draped, garlanded and bedecked by objects that had been wholly transformed by ornamentation. The time spent on embellishment resulted in offerings of great beauty that were all the more poignant since they were created in the midst of extreme poverty and squalor, hunger and disease. That perfect beauty could co-exist with unrelenting hardships and horror seemed dismayingly incongruous to Evans at first but later she realized that ornamentation is a process that not only inspires order but also functions as ritual.

Evans' new paintings are, as usual, delicately painted, often framed by a thin strip of color to define the limits of the painting - as Indian miniatures do - often patterned in her favored polka dots or using cookie cutter as stamps in juxtaposition with buoyant bulbous biomorphic shapes that resemble strange sea blooms, interrupted here and there by ruffled or zigzagging lines or arabesques and spirals that at times appear calligraphic. They are overlaid with layers of translucent colors so you can see deep into the paintings, like looking into a lake or the moving currents of a river. Evans says she starts out noisy, the paint is all over, the colors raucous, the images colliding and then she quiets the painting down as she builds it up. But it is important to her that the viewer sees the conflict, the many complications roiling below the surface calm that become more blurred, disturbed and distorted the deeper you try to see into the painting. Her palette is flushed, with its rosy pinks, tender greens, blissful blues, saffron yellows but girded by voluptuous reds, cinnabars and darker hues, the colors of India as seen by a post - impressionistic post-modernist neo - P and D artist; hybridization is a two-way street. The luminosity and weightlessness of these canvases are enhances by the use of iridescent paint and the glitter she sprinkles on like largesse, like a benediction, boosting the shine level. In Evans' attempt to look deeper into beauty - part of a renewed dialogue that has engaged many artists over the past several years, part of a current need for solace - she has come to believe that to adorn can be an act of both profound reverence and reconciliation.
Lilly Wei

Image: Julie Evans, Untitled, 2001

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art 13 Jay Street, NY 10013-2848 New York

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