Magali Nougarede at Rosenberg + Kaufman

Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

It might have been the preponderance of liver-spotted hands, firmly grasped purses and sensible clothing, but the 17 photographs in Magali Nougarede's first U.S. solo exhibition conveyed a spirit of resilience rather than the simple obedience suggested by the show's title, "Toeing the Line." All were shot near the sea at Brighton, the adopted home of the French-born artist, with a flash used to minimize the shadows cast by the thin, grudging northern sun.

Most of Nougarede's subjects are older women, sometimes in pairs, shown in tight compositions that center on the torso and crop the head. Exceptions include a deliciously carefree little girl who has leaped high into the air despite her cumbersome skirt and heavy brogans. The pictures are edited in the viewfinder and rendered full frame as 20-inch-square C-prints. Grays, blues and browns prevail, though some crimson jolts are detonated by natural and fabric blossoms. One print stands out for a hibiscus-pink hair net that has settled over a wavy gray coif and onto the shoulders of a white coat to uncanny effect.

The abundant consistencies, along with an expert installation, contributed to the impression of viewing an album or essay that cumulatively detailed a compassionate nonnative's take on the stalwart British character. Untitled #16 (2004) presents the midsection of a woman in a belted camel wrap (so like one of Jim Dine's "Bathrobes") whose elbow is held by a man in a darker coat with leather buttons. The minimally implied narrative--a daily constitutional? waiting for a ferry?--suggests a lifetime's habit. Only once does Nougarede flirt with bathos, in Blind (2000), where an elderly woman assists her companion across a broad open space, while vivid foreground flowers and lightbulbs strung above their heads speak too obviously of all that the sightless woman cannot see.

There were touches of humor, too. The soft fold of a necktie printed with a bookshelf pattern makes the structure appear to be toppling. A woman who first seems to be carrying a patch of cloud-mottled sky in her lap proves to be clutching a blue net tote containing crumpled tissue and mail. And a photo-world in-joke is cracked by Sage Comme Une Image (meaning "good as gold," but literally "good as a picture"), 2000, whose two figures dressed in identical floral dresses and heathered-gray cardigans seem a riposte to Diane Arbus's famously lugubrious twins.

For all the affection on display, it was the unsentimental Untitled #18 (2004) which gave the ensemble its good tart flavor. The young women encountered here are a defiant and lovely pair, and wholly contemporary: one wears a cropped Burberry T-shirt. But that T-shirt is pink, and her partner wears a vintage baby-blue wool coat with a pink flower pinned to the collar. These are the nursery colors worn by pairs of aged women in two nearby photographs, and the otherwise innocent coincidence seemed to mark the girls as destined for a local future on the Brighton coast.