Suzan Dionne at ROME Arts - New York - exhibition of the artist's work

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by J.W. Mahoney

A halo is a circle of sacredness, a light-emanating form that signals a holy presence. The empty halos that are the subjects of Suzan Dionne's oil paintings are black, however, and each work breaks with the symbolic canon in a different way. One halo is refulgent, another radiates smoke or vapors, and a third appears to have been sprung from its perfectly circular tension so that it looks like a snake, a broken rubber band, a garden hose. Something unexpected is happening to them, which flavors the paintings with a tinge of comedy. As an expression of a visual archetype, though, these qualities give the subtle humor a darker edge.

Dionne, a New York-based artist, has been developing a language that is conscious of the textural and sensual dramas of an oil-painted surface. Her earlier work exploited the tensions of flatness in paintings of punctures, protrusions and simple forms whose symbolic possibilities were always implicit. This recent series (all works 2002) has a more direct, if quiet, intent.

Each black halo floats in a luminous atmosphere painted in candy colors. In Halo I, a passionate orange-pink provides the backdrop for an incomplete halo, its two ends rounded and bulbous. Halo II takes on a squiggly serpentine form, thicker in the middle than at the ends, bathed in an indigo-lavender glow. Halo III resembles the exhaust port of a jet engine with its curved inner edge lost in a soft haze of sunshine yellow.

The sheer incandescence in the visual fields of these pictures makes their central images all the more mysterious and heightens their skewed symbolism. The works are not so much self-expressions or essays on painting as illustrations of states of being--and every halo has a different fate. The halo in Halo I possesses a directionality, like the curve of a bird's wing, an oblique purposefulness. The ominous softness in the dissolution at the center of Halo III suggests the activity of an entropic force. Halo II is a double-headed viper, its ambivalence thoroughly empowered.

Rather than conveying holiness, Dionne's halos are uncertain, disjunctive or disintegrating. In cartoons, halos are often as elastic as those here and are intentionally funny, but these images convey a far graver impulse.