Susan Dory at Howard House - Brief Article

Susan Dory's small paintings made with wax and enamel on birch panel vary in size from 8 to 43 inches square. Although their consistent shape implies a serial or modular approach, these works display a remarkable variety of color and marking overall. Each painting consists of several parallel rows of repeated forms, but within those parameters Dory presents considerable compositional variety and proposes a range of potential meanings.

High-tech circuitry and lab specimens seen under electron microscopy are a few of the hidden worlds suggested by these individually intense and beautiful paintings. Some, like Untitled A, C, E and Y (all works 2000), set up distinct figure-ground relationships between the shapes depicted in colors that contrast with the monochromatic backgrounds. These particular works have a single broad margin at the left. In others, repeated square shapes mutate into stretched diamonds, triangles and irregular ovals. Organic growth or cellular evolution is strongly hinted at, but the scientific analogy yields to the purely formal interest of the pale, occasionally pastel, colors.

In Untitled B, V and X, the rows overlap into a blurry softness, accentuating a frail, delicate quality. In the largest work on view, Untitled M, the rows include chromosomelike shapes in white, brown and pink on a blue-green background. At nearly 4 feet square, and with a composition more active and optically oscillating than the other paintings, this work points toward what may be a more adventurous, if no less appealing, direction.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group