Victor M. Cassidy
For Joanna Pinsky, color is the main event. Her work explores color, not what she sees in the world, but what she imagines and makes happen with paint.
Pinsky's current show "Architectural Fragments" is up at Perimeter Gallery until September 3. She hangs twenty-one acrylic paintings on board, each shaped like an architectural fragment and each slightly tilted.
The artist paints from photographs taken on her travels. Her paintings show architectural details from below as they might be viewed at street level--or from above as seen from an upper story of a nearby building. Because of this angle of view, the fragments seem to project inwards or outwards and Pinsky installs paintings of inward-projected fragments next to paintings of outward-projected fragments, making the ensemble of paintings seem to move and even to hint at a tumbling or whirling action.
Most of the fragments are Latin American Colonial architecture. The originals are stone, but Pinsky depicts them in fantasy colors. For each painting, she makes a dark ground--purple, dark red, magenta, or brown--and lets it dry. Next, she covers the ground in lighter shades such as institutional green, orange, or yellow and scratches through this second coat while it is still wet to expose some of the dark ground color beneath. This adds line into her painting, strengthening it and enlivening the surface.
Pinsky pays very close attention to color matching. Cuban Flower Girl (2010) is a long rectangle with a girl's face at the top and flowers beneath. Colored rusty brown, orange, and yellow, this is one of the exhibition's sweeter pieces. Green Support (2010), which shows carved decorative stone that might be placed by a building roofline is a darker piece with a magenta ground overpainted with institutional green and orange. Some other paintings are toughened by their very dark grounds. Pinsky's installation fills all four walls in Perimeter's basement gallery and she groups the works roughly by color.
"Architectural Fragments" is the latest body of work in Pinsky's lifelong production of two-dimensional shaped paintings. Early on, she made shaped canvases, which evolved into geometrically-shaped works with textural surfaces of sand, sawdust, and gravel. Her next series was large-scale invented shapes inspired by aerial views of the landscape. In the 1990s, the artist based her paintings on architectural structures such as buildings, bridges, and viaducts. Now she focuses on architectural fragments. But color has always been Pinsky's thing and here, as always, her colors are a wonder to behold.
Filed under: Art Review, Art Talk Chicago
Tags: Architectural Fragments, Joanna Pinsky, Perimeter Gallery, Victor M. Cassidy
