Shirley Jaffe at Tibor de Nagy - New York

How can there be relevance for hard-edge abstraction today when every aspect of our world hovers on the edge of confusion? By embracing and transforming that very chaos, Shirley Jaffe renders the discord into a rigorous, energetic, poised body of work. The artist seems to be telling us: "Get used to it."

Jaffe, an American painter long based in Paris, is getting more crafty and quirky in her maturity. What kind of fool would hobble a painting such as Bruit d'ete (Summer Noise) with colored rectangles locked smack-dab in every corner? Then plop a black square with a circumscribed purple rectangle and toss in a few jaunty trapezoids? Doesn't that Pepto-Bismol-pink open-sided square drown us in too much orthogonality? I marvel at how this incongruous melange resists imploding into a stolid mess, and instead performs an up-to-date techno tango for us. Jaffe hones her spectrum of unexpected couplings, smoothing them to flinty congruency, without nonsense, bravura or fat.

If the defining characteristic of modernist color is its unimpeded freedom to create movement across a canvas, then Jaffe may be the most skilled colorist at work today. It is the color within her forms that propels us--from the quiet of a dead blue to a soaring fuschia to benign pearly gray--and then an acid bite of kumquat. She has told me that she wants each complex, refined, unnameable color to "have specific emotional meaning." The chromatically precise colors let our eyes lurch over the surface, sometimes rushing, sometimes lingering.

These works reveal their stories without words. Only the eye can unravel their inner logic. The pun of off-primrose to a neighboring whitened ocher, or the bizarre dialogue between a silly squiggle and a sober rectangle become treasures to be discovered and savored on a purely visual level.

Other artists have always appreciated and championed Jaffe's work. They know how hard it is to appear so effortless, how well she conceals her intense reflection and labor in order to lead us into her idiosyncratic scatters of color and form. But every contour, edge and shade is tested, retested, considered and committed. Perhaps we fellow painters best understand the enormous risks she confronts at every turn, and quietly applaud her savoir faire. It is time for her reputation to escape the confines of the "painter's painter" label. Simply put, she is one of our finest painters working today, bar none.

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