Isabelle Champion Metadier at the Chelsea Art Museum

Titled "Timetrackers," the 16 large abstractions in French painter Isabelle Champion Metadier's recent exhibition are vertical compositions measuring about 90 by 51 inches (2004-05). In each, a single large, composite form fills almost the entire height and width of the frame, and consists of three to six parts differentiated by shape and color. These bright-hued forms are set against white grounds that function as foils and also as positive shapes in their own right. The colored forms twist and turn and are full of erotic tension, as parts seem to restrain other parts, which swell almost to the bursting point. Playfully asymmetrical, they feel deliciously arbitrary, as if ready to flip over or reverse their contractions and expansions in the blink of an eye.

The curvilinear shapes are reminiscent of early organic abstractions such as Arp's carved planar wood reliefs, in which each constituent part or the entire composition is painted a single color. Yet Champion Metadier seems also to be inspired by the shapes of fruits and vegetables, the rhythms of the body and mellifluous forms in design (Philippe Starck comes to mind). The sinuous outlines manage to give the impression of volume, although the shapes themselves are quite flat, painted in matte colors. However, in the areas where two colors overlap, there can be a shift in hue, or bleeding and blurring, effects that soften what might otherwise be a cold, mechanical appearance.

In one painting, a dark purple oblong form tipped at either end with black is being squeezed in the middle by an orange ring as swollen as a tire, so that all parts appear to be on the verge of exploding. Another depicts a large, soft, bright-red shape with a black knob at the top and a beige, optically receding loop at the bottom, giving the impression that the whole form is collapsing like a half-empty hot-water bottle. Champion Metadier's bold, reductive, synthetically colored compositions turn the torsions of nature into artifice, as catchy as logos.

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