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Gina Werfel at Prince Street
Art in America, May, 2004 by Vincent Katz
Over the past two decades, Gina Werfel has developed a way of painting that tantalizingly walks the line between landscape and abstraction. In recent works from 2002-03, the scale of her marks makes them difficult to interpret as elements of a coherent view. Werfel often uses brushes an inch or more wide, making blunt marks that loosely articulate the contours of her subjects. While the scenes may be read from afar, up close the paramount impression is of individual brushstrokes. Even from far away, the marks assert themselves as separate from one another.
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In this exhibition, the horizontal canvases tended to be more legible as landscapes, while the verticals functioned more as abstractions. This has partly to do with the fact that the verticals appear to be made at closer vantage points. Whether, as their titles suggest, the vertical views are of a garden, an arboretum, a cascade or reflections, they seem to indicate the effects of light on variegated surfaces and colors, while horizontal pieces like Pink House, English Hills and Bone's Farm (all 2002) make use of long views that maintain the recognizability of natural and man-made structures.
Lobster Pound (2002) is a deft depiction of reflections in water and the forms composing the sides of small dwellings. The viewer, simultaneously reading the image as a conventional scene and a disorienting conglomeration of strokes, is placed in a situation that is at once intelligible and unfamiliar. In such works, Werfel's technique most alluringly captures the particularity of the places she depicts, whether they be in Maine or in the Southwest, two regions in which she has worked over the years.
Werfel's colors are often muted, and there is much tonal subtlety within her surging strokes. Because her marks can cover broad swaths of depicted areas, she does not need to fuss with intricacies of observed texture and color; the relationships in which she is interested are those within the painting, not the landscape. Her works tend to be in the 2-by-3-foot range; one wonders what would happen to Werfel's perceptual experiment if she upped the sizes of her canvases. She might find some surprising results.
--Vincent Katz
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