Jacqueline Humphries at Greene Naftali

A recent exhibition of paintings by Jacqueline Humphries presented a first impression of frenetic activity--sweeping gestures from the wrist, shoulder and elbow. One could very much feel her standing before and acting on these squarish canvases, nine of them large (about 6 to 8 feet in each dimension) and four medium size (36 by 44 inches).

In each work (all 2006), luscious silver and different-colored paints dance within layers. Almost all the paintings were made using masking tape as a resist, removed to reveal irregular sections of previous layers. The tape zips veer off in various directions, caroming and curving through space. Because the undercoats contain the same colors as those on top, they seem simultaneously to merge and subtly separate; the effect is not unlike that of two similar but slightly variant computer images spliced together.

The silver paint unifies the group. As its perceived color and darkness change in relation to the surrounding light, the silver acts as both foreground and background. Together, the silver and other colors--mostly black, red, blue, purple and a bit of green--conjure up urban experiences: reflections and tawdry glamour. A sense of bustle is heightened by the busy, allover compositions.

In Kat, black paint looks like it's been wiped onto the wet silver ground with a rag, mixing into glittery grays. The gray-black follows the movement of an arm swinging back and forth, creating a 4-foot-wide smudge that meanders down the surface. Green underpainting peeks out from the bottom right corner. The effect is of a calamitous cleaning that, rather than removing a mess, spreads it still further, creating silver cloud shapes at the edges where the arm couldn't reach.

Dark Star's composition follows a rough diagonal, from lower left to upper right, visually hinging the painting. Dense purple brush-swipes on the silver ground cluster above the diagonal, intersected by silver stripes where the tape was pulled off. The purple dissolves toward the left edge under bursts of silver spray paint. Below the diagonal, silver paint, elegantly splattered with a few purple drips, is pushed around thickly. The tape lines whip the eye across the purple puddle, giving the painting a sense of speed in a confined space.

Humphries's work has for many years borrowed from the tough-minded New York tradition of gestural abstraction while responding to the manner in which pictures have changed in an era of screen images. As in Monet's work after World War I, violence and beauty are inseparable. But Humphries also manages to express, in an admirably visceral way, the contemporary tug between the verity of images and the deceit inherent in their making.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning