Ann Wilson and Carol Ross at Janos Gat

A relatively unsung member of the Coenties Slip group, Ann Wilson worked alongside Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney and Ellsworth Kelly in the late 1950s. Using antique American quilts as supports, Wilson enhanced their sewn geometric designs with her own painterly marks. A recent show of eight collages and ten paintings offered a compelling coda to Wilson's early quilt paintings. These new works employ blocks of found or painted color to create radiant patchwork abstractions.

Wilson currently creates collages from tree leaves, which she cuts into small squares and rectangles. Working with an autumnal palette of reds, golds and greens, she organizes the cropped leaves into geometric compositions. A wine red square dominates Protean I (2001) and is bordered on three sides by strips of orange, yellow and green. In Protean II (2001), Wilson arranges russet-toned leaves into three columns. Vaguely resembling smokestacks, these vertical forms advance before a sun-drenched field of pale green and gold squares.

The geometric rigor of these collages is countered by signs of natural change and decay. Brown speckles litter most of the leaves, as do occasional tears and holes. Also remarkable are the veins of each leaf, which Wilson carefully integrates into her compositions. The veins form delicate, irregular skeins of diagonal lines across the insistent grids, providing an organic antidote to the artist's more rational arrangements of color and form.

In the end, nature will finally claim these collages, whose colors fade with the passage of time. As if to arrest this chromatic drain, Wilson creates multiple painted versions of each composition. When translated into watercolor on silk, her paintings retain both the muted palette and slightly wrinkled texture of the leaf collages. Other versions are realized in egg tempera on gessoed panels. Through a layered application of pigments and glazes, Wilson generates mosaics of dense, sparkling jewel-tones. Their vibrancy surpasses that of the leaf-laden originals.

Also employing a geometric vocabulary, Carol Ross offered three aluminum laminate sculptures and one made from cherry wood. Sharp-edged, symmetrical and brushed to smooth finishes, these three-dimensional forms boldly assert themselves like corporate icons. Yet this initial impression of impersonal minimalism is softened by various organic associations. In the magnificent Monarch (2002), for example, pyramidal quadrants are cleaved apart by deep notches to suggest the open wings of a butterfly. As though reversing Wilson's abstractions from nature, Ross coerces an elegant naturalism from potentially sterile shapes and materials.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group