Judith Raphael at Lyonswier - New York

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Robert Berlind

The two worst years of a woman's life, it has been said, are when she is 13 and when her daughter is 13. Judith Raphael's paintings of young girls explore that pivotal cusp, when childhood and adolescent sexuality, sweet innocence and not-so-sweet savvy, tenderness and fierceness are in the balance. In the past she adopted the figural rhetoric of Classical and Renaissance art to show girls in heroic combat. More recently she has derived poses from extreme-sports photos.

Valkyries (all works 2003) depicts two insouciant girls on bikes, one upside down, flying through the air, the other rearing up on a back wheel. Behind them, in pale pastels, is a frieze of images of proper little girls that seems to be taken from illustrated children's fare, circa 1938. Raphael's two vibrant Valkyries are thus seen against a background of earlier images of girlhood dating from the artist's own younger years. The cyclists, emblems of liberation, would be at home with Nancy Spero's heroic females.

An affecting group of portraits, 12 by 10 inches each, probes the psyches of girls of diverse disposition and race, some melancholy, some sly, some defiant, against luminous grounds of delicate peach and violet. The series is collectively titled "Litmus Test," as though to indicate degrees of temperamental acidity. Several larger pictures show a girl engaged in opening a small, bright red box. In Pandemonium, she is seated, an expression of deep consternation on her face, as she unleashes an astonishing plethora of minuscule items--airplanes, boats, fishes, flowers and birds, among the tiny bits of debris--swirling upward in a double arc. The theme evokes the acute anxieties, those of the kids portrayed and those of the responsible adults, that attend coming of age.

Many of Raphael's girls are African-American or, more exactly, mixed race. Such representation is not a nod to multiculturalism but a reflection of the ethnic composition of the artist's own family. Each little girl has been lingered over and imagined with psychological acuity, as whole and individual rather than representing a generalized idea of identity.

All of the paintings are made using acryla, a matte, acrylic-based gouache, on clayboard panels. These materials account in part for the exquisite delicacy of surface and fine-tuning of color that enhance and set off the spunk of these complex, modern kids.