Monique Prieto at Cheim & Read - New York

Art once claimed to offer entry into a world alternative to the everyday one, a world superior because spiritual or purified of the accidents that hide essence. Monique Prieto's paintings belong to a historical period in which such claims are no longer credible or even very interesting. While the generally large format of her canvases indicates the seriousness of her ambition, what they provide is one of the more modest and best things abstraction can offer--not a substitute for nature but an addition to it, not a derivative of the world but a part of it.

The paintings are typically about relations and based on them: relations of drawing to color, of paint to canvas, of unprogrammatically, but unabashedly, flat design to the physical and emotional world of human beings. In Blue Contact (96 by 107 inches), a pair of tall blue shapes--one lighter but more stolid and more firmly planted, the other a deeper color, more shapely though a little awkward--lean together at the center of the unprimed canvas. Calibration of hue and value keeps them even in the plane, but it seems natural to ask of them, as one might of a human couple, which is stronger, which more clinging, which more tender. They are at once quite different from each other and closely related: a color couple, not a representation of persons but painted shapes with some of the attributes of people.

Each of the three tall shapes--beige, purplish black and violet-gray--juxtaposed in Around the Corner (60 by 72 inches) suggests the idea of a long brushstroke, though they are in fact painted areas within a drawn line. The role of the hand in producing that line--each element of Prieto's compositions is first sketched out on a computer tablet--creates the thought of gesture without gesture itself. The even layer of acrylic Prieto lays down to fill her drawn outlines is not so thin that one could mistake it for a stain, but the weave of the canvas is visible through it, so that the unpainted material ground and color planes are bound together. Paradoxically, the result is that color becomes substance, at once material and metaphorical (as in Drift, in which aqua and blue-black shapes hang like breeze-blown laundry on a nonexistent line, combining literal and figurative weight and weightlessness).

Prieto seems less occupied than other present-day abstractionists with the relations between painting and other modes of image-making. Instead, she employs the physical and formal resources of her medium to imbue shape and color with a wide range of human feeling, from wistful tenderness to (somewhat insecure) determination. It's hard to imagine anyone open to the powers of painting not loving this work.

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