Jo Smail at Heriard-Cimino

"Degrees of Fluency" was an exhibition of nine bright canvases, ranging from 36 by 48 to 80 by 60 inches, all the work of South Africa-born artist Jo Small, now a resident of Baltimore. The show was curated by New York artist Margaret Evangeline, who writes in the gallery's press release that Clement Greenberg selected Smail's work for an important South African exhibition in 1975. An emphasis on pure optical qualities characterized Smail's nonobjective work at that time and continued to do so into the 1990s. Works of that decade--represented in the recent show by Patched Heart II (1997)--typically feature uneven checkerboard squares and, less often, triangles, in soft, creamy-white and flesh-colored fields that suggest paradoxical organic geometries.

In 2000 Small suffered a stroke that destroyed her ability to speak. The struggle to re-master speech, a struggle that became spiritual as well as physical for Smail, informs the remaining eight canvases in the show. In these, her pink and white geometries are still present but paler, and serve as faint backgrounds for other, more emphatic forms. Those earlier patterns here seem like memories (as if the earlier work were being equated with her earlier self) rendered even more distant by black elements painted, poured or dripped on top. In Howling Mongrel (2004), a precisely painted black circle enters the right side of a field of pink and white triangles and encounters a spiral of malformed black circles, one after another. Like a visual approximation of garbled speech, the spiral consists of thin trickles of enamel poured right out of the can--not the best way to achieve rounded perfection. The painting articulates a contest for control that reveals a certain beauty in the body's awkward struggle.

Sometimes the black paint renders simple silhouetted objects, such as the three leaf forms against the faded pastel-pink ground of Black Angels with Handkerchiefs (2002). Occasionally, these seem too much like textile motifs (Marimekko comes to mind). But other examples display a new graphic inventiveness, perhaps catalyzed by Smail's 2002 collaboration with compatriot William Kentridge on canvases that mixed charcoal drawing and collage. In this exhibition, Smail's Incomprehensible Triangles (2003-04), a unique yellow painting, pairs hovering pink triangles on the right with a whimsically drawn figure on the left, a self-portrait, with a black bulbous form rising above her head. It refers to a text balloon, but the solid black zone says nothing. Now, the painter who can speak again seems to contemplate the elusiveness of communication. The works in this show utter a very personal language, one not easily understood but delightful to experience.

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