NEW YORK: Andrea Belag at Bill Maynes

Art in America, Dec, 1998 by Stephen Westfall

Andrea Belag's new paintings are her most abstract in years, but the lived-in world is openly evoked by their fluidly applied bands of color that deepen in contrast as layers of paint are laid across the surfaces. In many of her paintings this process builds her imagery into chunky grids that echo post-and-lintel architecture (notably present in the Maynes gallery space itself). The light is crepuscular; the viewer can easily imagine looking out at sundown from a loft window. The spatial crowding effected by the wideness of her bands and her regulated masses of light and dark produces the feeling of urban sequences of pressure and release.

Because the light in Belag's paintings seems to come largely from behind or underneath her semi-transparent bands of color, there is also a sense of the light of the cinema. Even the semi-gloss smoothness of the dried paint suggests colored gels and film emulsions. Noir (1997-98) is perhaps the painting that most emphatically conjoins the associations of landscape seen through a window and the light and materiality of film. The dark, blue-gray verticals on either side of the picture billow like drapery at the bottom of the canvas, framing the horizontal bands that suggest a sunset over water. If the painting's title keys a recognition of the filmic quality of the light and the cropped space of the picture, other titles refer to the presence of water: River, Harbor and Rain (all 1998). We are reminded that New York, where Belag resides, is both a seaport and a river town. In either direction, east or west, the view through the city's architectural canyons lands us in light on a river. With these paintings, Belag could be inaugurating a body of geometric abstraction as firmly tied to place as Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" series.

The comparison to Diebenkorn is not idle. Belag is one of a handful of younger midcareer artists who are making abstract paintings that draw from both the life-world and the entire history of painting (it was Bellini, after all, who made the great series of portraits with landscape peeking out from behind the figure framed by dark, massively proportioned window ledges). That Belag has moved between abstraction and a poetic, almost folkloric representation while maintaining and developing a characteristic sense of color and gestural scale suggests that she is after something more than a "reading" of painting and place. For Belag, in this breakout show, the interaction between painting and place is nurturing a tone-rich temperament.