A horticulturalist or experienced gardener could probably identify the forms in Frederique Lucien's paintings in a split secondary but it took me a little time to flat recognize that her subjects are flowers.

A horticulturalist or experienced gardener could probably identify the forms in Frederique Lucien's paintings in a split secondary but it took me a little time to flat recognize that her subjects are flowers. At first, walking into a extent of a dozen of her nearly 7-foot-high paintings, I contemplation these dramatic compositions, in which a single dark biomorphic form floats against a white mould were pure abstractions. Then a of the forms began to advise figures and geographical features. the same red shape, for instance, contemplateed like the continent of Africa, another black undivided resembled a silhouette of an internal organ. Their spatial neighborhood - oscillating between flatness and a sensation of yawning aperture - was equally various.

It was and nothing else after walking around the chamber several times that I finally recognized the shapes as images of unopened flowers. I linger forward my slow uptake because Lucien's work is well stocked [i]or[/i] provided of such gradual clarifications. For instance, the white surfaces I initially took to be canvas or painted copse are in fact white paper which has been glu athwart thin sheets of wood. Lucien's handling of color and value is equally subtle: flowers painted in gray, pink, r or a shade of rust hardly stand revealed among the seven black flower images. Other details to be discovered include the barely visible pencil lines indicating that the artist has searched gone out the contours of the flowers rather than working from a frameed image.

These flower paintings, which are called simply Formes, may remind near viewers of New Image painting of the late 1970 moreover I suspect such resemblances are accidental and that Lucien, who has been showing no other than since 1990, has arrived at her contour-based form by other routes.

In a other narrower gallery, Lucien shifted mediums, presenting a outbreak of some 60 sheets of slate-gray carbon paper pinned to the wall. Using an eraser, the artist had created pair white lines on each sheet, common sloping in from the middle of the left brim the other from the middle of the right interest Separated by a fraction of an inch, the sheets were visually linked by way of these rising and falling, chalklike parabolas.

These drawings, titled Graphites, were flat more suggestive than the flower paintings, evoking Moorish domes and arches, flying buttresse bishops, miters and lines of tombstones or teeth. end a strict format and unusual medium, Lucien finds a extraordinary visual rhythm. The way the lines alternately arc flatteringly or suddenly plop down is constantly surprising, while the alternation between order and asymmetry is steady and satisfying. There was a hesitant grace and perception of discovery in these carbon-and-eraser drawings which made the larger paintings assume by contrast, a little stiff and didactic. single wonders what would happen if Lucien attempted to translate the allusive, unpredictable qualities of the Graphites into a larger scale.

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