Terence La Noue at David Beitzel - New York - Brief Article

The tessellated passages of Terence La Noue's abstractions emerge from dense matrices of material riven into shards and exuberantly reassembled into complex, layered fields. In constructing them, La Noue continues to draw upon an abiding interest in process and his experience as a world traveler. His titles suggest that these paintings imagine the tumultuous events of an ongoing personal odyssey, in the course of which he has come to terms with the pantheons of not-so-disparate cultures, from the ancient, silent gods of Mexico to the living gods of India. The 10 large paintings and 10 small paintings and drawings included in this exhibition marked La Noue's solo return to the New York gallery scene after an absence of five years.

The "Maelstrom" series accounted for seven of the large works, easel-scaled at roughly 6 feet to a side. In Maelstrom: Helen of Troy (1993-2001), a thoroughly abstracted figure to the right is held erect by a spine of alluring tesserae inlaid with small, jewel-like tiles of painted and gilded material. The principal figure presides over swirling shapes of vivid color extending to the painting's borders. La Noue edges the unstretched canvases with defining lines of color to emphasize both field and object; each falls like a banner unfurling under the weight of its own fabric. A graceful skein of paint recalling a Vedic inscription hovers in the midst of the electric atmosphere of Maelstrom: Lakshima (1991-2001), while shapes suggesting the primary attribute of the feathered serpent of Mexico's promised redemption vivify Maelstrom: Quetzalcoatl (1999-2001). The latter consists of an evocative dance of primary hues and orchestrated spills of paint that emerge and recede where zones of color overlap or meet.

Often, the distribution of mosaic patterns approaches the Gaudiesque, as though fashioned from bits and pieces of broken tile and pottery. Some passages suggest the complex art brut marquetry of Simon Rodia's process-driven elaborations of form and color. La Noue's adventurous, celebratory paintings also suggest bifurcated architectural constructions, one element addressing the other, informing motifs and changes in direction, carefully resolving passages without attempting symmetry of expression. The greater part of the framed mixed-medium canvases installed in Beitzel's project room were mounted on jig-cut plywood. The thin, painted edges of the canvases extend just beyond the thick, wooden support, as though testifying to the enduring vitality of abstract painting and the shaped canvas. In all of these driven, certainly generous works, La Noue's abstract figures promenade with determined spontaneity up, down, in, out and across the engaging expanses of what are, after all, intensely modern paintings, like some exuberant offspring of Hans Hofmann by way of Elizabeth Murray.

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