Jay DeFeo at Michael Rosenfeld - New York

"Ingredients of Alchemy: Before and After The Rose" provided a rare opportunity to survey the career of San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo. She is known primarily for one enormous painting, The Rose (1958-66). During the years that DeFeo spent creating the work, it played a crucial role in defining the community of artists and poets who were her friends and colleagues; it has since been understood as part of the general efflorescence of Beat culture. The 26 paintings and drawings on view--which ranged in date from DeFeo's art-school days in the early 1950s through the last works she completed before her death in 1989--made a case for understanding The Rose not as an art-historical anomaly but as part of a cohesive body of work.

The earliest paintings on display reaffirmed DeFeo's legendary capacity for crafting exquisitely expressionistic compositions. In pieces from 195253, she layered thin sheets of color over rough paper, adding hurried totemic figures that evoke relics or archeological fragments. In Song of Innocence (1957), methodically feathered brushstrokes create a dark, shimmering vortex from which light seems poised to escape. The work attests to the artist's faith in both the craft of painting and the spiritual capacity of art.

The show was most remarkable for its attention to DeFeo's largely figurative paintings and drawings of the 1970s and '80s, which the artist based around ordinary objects from her home. In Untitled (Water Goggles), 1977, DeFeo sets a pair of swimmer's goggles in motion against a blank ground. She suggests the goggles' straps with abbreviated wisps of graphite that twist and whip about the page. Thin yet tactile layers of white and black acrylic lend texture and stability to the lenses and pads, as if only the calculated attention of painting could pin the goggles down.

The exhibition also made a case for understanding DeFeo as a conceptualist. During the 1970s, she experimented with photography as a means for transforming the immediacy of experience into something visually and intellectually abstract. To arrive at the astonishing Untitled (Tripod), 1977, DeFeo made numerous photographs of her camera tripod, repeatedly photocopied the results, and then painted and drew an imaginary composite that resembles a tripod but is also partly abstract. Other parts are anthropomorphized, resembling pelvic or collarbones. DeFeo's process introduces a caesura for contemplation between looking at an object and painting it; the result highlights the idiosyncrasy of painting.

The larger paintings shown here share with The Rose DeFeo's predilection for patiently building up a form by altering and reworking it. In Crescent Bridge (1972), the artist's dental bridge is so abstracted that it is almost unrecognizable. The painting is not simply a representation of an object; the object has instead provided the structure for organizing the artist's experience of the world as painting.

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