Ame Yoes at Space - Chicago, Illinois

Art in America, May, 1995 by Sue Taylor

In these exuberant oil-on-wood panels, Amy Yoes revisits a heady moment in the 1970s when the Pattern and Decoration movement revitalized American painting. Luxuriating in the profuse ornament that swirls across her pictures, one thinks of the liberating gestures of Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Schapiro. There is of course a difference: Yoes's paeans to the decorative impulse are also hip postmodern amalgams of historical motifs, from Greek-key designs to insular interlace and Renaissance grotesques. Her bold, intricate paintings include passages of Abstract-Expressionist splatter and drip, often relegated to the background or upstaged by a riot of calligraphic flourishes and rhythmic geometries. The highart modernist code for individual spontaneity thus becomes just another element in Yoes's survey of the human tendency to embellish.

The seven panels in this exhibition echo the allover compositions of Action Painting, but Yoes replaces Pollock's tangled skeins and de Kooning's Cubist-derived scaffolds with lovingly rendered ribbons, ruffles, drapery and tasseled cords. The motifs are chaotically juxtaposed in a deceptively shallow space where forms advance and recede with dizzying abandon. Scale, too, seems arbitrary and out of whack, as details that could have originated on a belt buckle or teacup explode into monumental proportions. Yoes lifts her motifs from wallpaper, linoleum, wrought-iron gates, picture frames, kitchen appliances, restaurant china-things close at hand, yet so forgettable that one strains to identify familiar patterns. Released from the articles or surfaces they adorn, Yoes's ordinarily marginal palmettes, leafy spirals, scrolls and intertwined or addorsed letters assume the lofty status of subject matter.

Still clinging to these decontextualized fragments are culturally determined associations: some designs look "regal," others "exotic," "official" or "'50s modern." Yoes's retro palette of orange and turquoise, mauve, olive and rust, suggests a nostalgia for aging hotel lobbies, faded greeting cards and antique jewelry. The titles, such as Blush Now Dusty Sweets, No Lack of Suitors and Ubiquitous Kiss, create a mood of old-fashioned romance.

Yoes's work also brings to mind the Victorian-era English architect Owen Jones. Like Jones's classic book Grammar of Ornament, Yoes's paintings direct an appreciative, historicist gaze on ornamental detail through the ages. But in contrast to Jones's neat catalogue of decoration, in Yoes's richly inventive and sumptuous panels the history of ornament comes alive, and runs energetically amok.