Cecily Kahn at Lohin Geduld

If her slightly warped geometry and dissonant, high-keyed colors sometimes suggest the cartoon world of Elizabeth Murray, Cecily Kahn is more deeply rooted in the tradition of abstraction. Her recent, modestly scaled paintings abound in allusions to Cubism and to Matisse cut-outs, but they are bound together by more unstructured areas--puddles of dripped paint, tangled lines and irregularly woven grids. Some surfaces look like enlarged specimens of tissue, with soft, irregular structures. They suggest rust, corrosion or mildew--metaphors of decay--but they also provide fluid transitions that weave together flat shapes and create some thing more than just a collage of abstract quotations.

Kahn aspires to Hans Hofmann's synthesis of structure and expression, albeit on a more intimate scale and without his gestural bombast. Where Hofmann pours and spatters, building dense accumulations of pigment, Kahn applies her drips with an eye-dropper; her forms tend to dissolve in light. Like Hofmann's, though, they suggest spaces of substantial scale, even in their modest format. Reach (2004) is full of movement, suggesting some Egyptian funeral barge loaded with textiles and exotic objects. Rich reds and oranges contrast with washed-out bluish surfaces; meshwork on the left opens onto some deeper orange space, while skeins of broken meshwork on the right seem to trail behind. In Drama (2002-04), a similar contrast of warm and cool colors animates the opposition of curved and angular background shapes, held together by a blue stain; against them an abstracted figure seems threatened by irregular orange tentacles, like frost on a windowpane.

If such tangled strokes recall those of Jonathan Lasker, Kahn seems less related to such postmodern abstraction than to the more organically organized works of the modern tradition--to integration rather than fragmentation. Shapes aren't isolated against austere white backgrounds, but against other colors and textures in rich interaction. Kahn goes back to early abstraction not just in her wealth of allusions but in her meticulous efforts to forge a seamless vessel of space, an image of inward wholeness. These efforts might represent a retreat into her meticism; to those who've replaced modernism's ideal forms with the systems and models of cybernetics, even Kahn's corroded grids would seem overly pretty. Yet Kahn reminds us that when the world is too much with us, the virtual world of abstraction can offer a refreshing, hedonistic pleasure, like the purely formal play of dance or music.

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