Claire Seidl at Rosenberg + Kaufman

Claire Seidl's work is squarely in the early American modernist tradition. The antecedents of her paintings and photographs are the works of Marin, Hartley and especially Dove, whose experiments in abstraction seemed to strive for some essential image of the animate forces underlying the visual experience of nature. Seidl's paintings, with their blunted contours, blending chroma and reticulate brushwork, are all about flux, immanence and the mutating visual field.

A dozen paintings recently on view varied widely in size, palette and touch, and each developed according to its own set of contingencies, taking on its own set of risks. Array (36 by 32 inches, 2001), with its expansive upper region, advancing foreground and copselike central mass of scraped and brushed deep greens and blues, is the most obviously landscape-derived of these paintings, while the mysterious and very beautiful Dark Horse (38 by 46 inches, 2002) defies a quick scan. Brushy veils of runny blue-black and purple-black glazes that form the lumbering, shadowy dominant shape go soft around the edges where they meet with a flurrying yellowish ground.

The dry, scraped shards of warm black suspended in a pale field in World of Good (44 by 72 inches, 2003) evoke the action of waves. This is the one painting in the show featuring a distinctly matte surface. More often, surfaces are glossy, or even sticky-looking, and unafraid of seeming unpretty. The radical wiping-out of Let Up (42 by 36 inches, 2003) is reminiscent of Bill Jensen's use of the same technique: the painting has not been abandoned so much as left the hell alone.

As a photographer, Seidl channels Albert Pinkham Ryder. What might be called an apparitional quality in her paintings was even stronger in the nine black-and-white photographs on view, as in the filigree of tree branches against silvery moonlit water in Stairway (2002). There's plenty of recognizable imagery to do with a wooded lakeside property and the people who gather there, but the massing of ghostly pale forms and streaking linear elements on dusky or velvety black grounds makes the effect nocturnal, while the atmosphere in her paintings might be characterized as afternoon haze. The photographs are nearly uniform in size, around 15 inches square. Of them, Studio (2003) is the standout. A pair of vertical rectangles is almost lost among the shadow and glare of tree limbs and nightlights. They are windows, glowing white in the dark.

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