An eye in the city - painting, Shirley Jaffe, Musee Matisse, Nice, France

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Raphael Rubinstein

In Jaffe's paintings everything has a complex visual function. The individual forms call to us, asking to be extracted from the environment of the painting, just as they are bound into its structure. This structure in turn is stretched between the poles of rationality and randomness. Resisting the notion that forms worthy of contemplation require calm and isolation, her canvases make one contend with interference and confusion, just as in the real world, and just as in those photographs of the half-demolished Gare Montparnasse that so fascinated her 30 years ago.

This doesn't mean that Jaffe's paintings should be read as abstracted versions of the urban environment. In their fragmented and arduous mutation that ultimately breaks with resemblance, Jaffe's shapes are far removed from the forms deployed in Ellsworth Kelly's '50s paintings, many of which also had their inspiration in things seen around Paris. Perhaps the unlikely formal connections in Jaffe's arenas of controlled chaos have more in common with the work of certain contemporary sculptors. To my mind, aspects of her paintings recall the work of George Sugarman (another veteran of postwar Paris), as well as younger sculptors like Jessica Stockholder or Daniel Wiener. There's even something in the way Jaffe perceives shape that makes me think of Tony Cragg's early planar groupings of found plastic fragments.

Having begun to paint in the artistic space opened up by Abstract Expressionism, Jaffe went on to develop an unexpected, personal style that seems to unite American brazenness with French clarity. Over the last several decades, her critique of gestural abstraction and fascination with the urban environment have led to an increasingly complex visual language. Yet for all her attention to the world around her, Jaffe's concern as a painter is ultimately not with objects but with phenomena. Thus she says: "What does one look at? How does one look? That's the essential thing for me."(6) Like many a philosopher, Jaffe has found on the streets of Paris an unexpected passage into pure speculation.

(1.)"Entretien avec Shirley Jaffe" by Jean-Paul Ameline and Dominique Bornhauser, in Manifeste, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1993. (All translations in this article by the author.)

(2.)"Entretien avec Shirley Jaffe," by Yves Michaud in Shirley Jaffe, peintures 1965-1989, Chateau de Jau, Cases de Pene, 1989, p. 30.

(3.)"Entretien," Michaux, p. 25.

(4.)Interview with Catherine Lawless, in Shirley Jaffe, Oeuvres-Works 1983-1991, Musee de Valence, 1992, p. 104.

(5.)"Shirley Jaffe, Histoire d'un tableau" by Yves Michaud, Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, 1985.

(6.)"Entretien," Ameline and Bornhauser.