Material imperatives - exhibits of Louise Fishman's paintings at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Temple Gallery and Temple University's Tyler Gallery; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Miriam Seidel

These works, which seem to move in the direction of immateriality, oddly reaffirm Fishman's early involvement with process and materials. Her admixture of ashes and beeswax, albeit in homeopathically small amounts, makes these paintings de facto reliquary objects. We are, quite literally, in the presence of the dead. These works force the question of how one can possibly mourn epic loss-a charged question in this era of Aids-and whether abstraction, or any symbolic representation, is up to the task. That these paintings can exist simultaneously as abstract evocations and as jarringly real memorials to an obscene event testifies to Fishman's daring and maturity.

Fishman's most recent paintings, which follow another period of experimentation, mark a return to the modified grid format that has so frequently been a mainstay of her approach. In these new works, a roughly gridded black ground is punctuated by windowlike patches of color. The small painting Sipapu (1991) suggests a dark interior that opens on a gumpse of sky blue (the sipapu is the ritual opening in a Pueblo kiva, a ceremonial space through which spirit is supposed to enter). The larger Shadows and Traces (1992), with its schematic array of different-hued "windows," recalls our own mental "screen" upon which images take shape out of blackness.

Seeing all this work together led to a clear sense of Fishman's longstanding dual commitment to the physicality of her mediums, on the one hand, and to more abstract pictorial concerns, on the other. Finally, and particularly in the Remembrance and Renewal, series, her paint-substances have become saturated with metaphor, moving toward a kind of alchemical identity with their symbolic content. In the growing fusion of the physical and the abstract we can discern an ever-livelier synthesis. This is a strong and uncompromising body of work.

[1.] Quoted in Michael Brenson, "Louise Fishman," catalogue essay, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, 1992. [2.] Quoted in Hester Stinnett, From Tyler to the Whitney: Abstraction and Feminism Guide Louise Fishman," Gestures (Tyler School of Art of Temple University Alumni Newsletter), Spring 1991.