Dannielle Tegeder at Jan Cicero - Brief Article

Dannielle Tegeder is a playful cynic who infuses her metaphoric paintings with witty social critique. Her vibrant, carefully ordered abstractions derive from architectural blueprints, transportation maps, computer images, and biological charts and diagrams. These various systems are abstracted to form the scaffoldings, if you will, for her own urban landscapes, richly hued geometrical compositions devoid of any human presence.

The 10 paintings and two works on paper presented in her recent solo show rely on a shared series of recurring motifs, Microscopic clusters of circles and flattened orbs, symbols for molecules and viruses, hover in tandem with small rectangles and squares against spare planes of saturated color. Tegeder's elemental forms and quirky biomorphic shapes become the building blocks for complex networks or habitats in which technology and the natural world coexist willy-nilly. Strong emphasis on horizontal and vertical bands of contrasting pigments, mainly acrylics, suggests conflicting subterranean worlds, while intersecting linear patterns, both painted and drawn, simulate underground passages and escape routes. Despite the dark implications of her quasi-narratives, Tegeder's palette includes a delicious array of citrus oranges and yellows, mint, avocado, aquamarine, and powdery pinks and blues that take their cue from popular culture.

Tegeder's lexical iconography also includes occasional botanically inspired forms, as in the Garden Plan Diptych and Blue Diptych City with Flying Object (each 12 by 24 inches). In both works, sinuous bits of flora cohabit with minute spheres and checkered planes across abutted panels whose rectangular grounds are painted in earthen colors--shades of celadon and pale watery blues, respectively. Here, Tegeder offers alternative, organic "systems" for ordering a society controlled by technology, nuclear weapons and biological warfare.

At first glance, Tegeder's colorful, stylized grids appear aligned with those early modernists whose luminous color fields and measured geometry, frequently distilled from nature, sought spiritual, universal truths. However, she also shares Peter Halley's pessimistic view of modernity, as evinced by her paintings' dystopian titles: Green Headquarters, Tangerine Secret City with Underground Stations and Yellow Escape Plan with Red Igloo. Like Halley, Tegeder grounds her emblematic cells and conduits in mimetic formalism, although her paintings are more lyrical than his, their smooth surfaces filled with delicate notations and sporadic pointillistic markings rendered in colored pencil, markers and ball-point pen. Such gestures cause the viewer to read her works rather intimately, regardless of scale, and to delight in the presence of the artist's hand.

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