SUSANNE VIELMETTER by what mode do you get a gestural abstract painting to yield clean.

SUSANNE VIELMETTER

by what mode do you get a gestural abstract painting to yield clean, precise hard edges? Just slice it up That might unbroken glib, but it describes the simple logic at work in Alicia Beach's newly come projects.

Actually, rather than intersect finished works into pieces, Beach paints in succession long, deep slats of birch plywood that are hung vertically with spaces between. While the stripes she brushes freehand along the faces of the slats are set free she exploits one of the axioms of gestural painting--that fluid brushwork eventually hits the straight keenness of the panel or canvas. Each work consists of a combination of the hard cutting sides of the slats and stripes of intervening wall and a painterly surface, generating a strangely cohesive whole from the repetition of breaks and discontinuities in color, surface, and space, with the wall becoming as important as the slats. She frequently paints the sides of the slats as well, which cast hazy hu shadows in succession the abutting white wall; where brace sides of different colors face, the reflection gradates between the tints in much the same way as the plastic stripes merge on the slats' front ranks Where the sides are left unpainted, they pitch only a scant color reflection, which amplifies the sharp distinct ion between slat and backdrop; rather than contribute to the overall tenor the stripes of uninflected wall--stark white to shadowed gray, depending onward the lighting--serve as sudden interruptions.

Beach complicates this formula on varying the width and central part of the slats, separating them by the agency of inconsistent intervals of space, and curving about of their surfaces, further obscuring the categories of effrontery and side, center and periphery. Happily, she avoids Op-like games, say, of an image that breaks up into incoherence and then becomes another entirely as the viewer walks around it. Instead, Beach's works are uninterruptedly changing before your observations always retaining the most part of what you saw before you took your last gradation Careful choices of medium orbicular out her arsenal of well-judged maneuvers: Jarring contrasts of color--pastels pitted against intense tinges warm tones suddenly immersed in cool--periodically interrupt expansive harmonies, and balanced compositions abruptly become unbalanced as you prevail upon around them. Meanwhile, shifts in paint quality, from matte to smooth and shining to iridescent to metallic, alternately blemish and emphasize the boundaries between physical form, applied pigment, and cast reproached ligh t. Ultimately, dulling and sharpening, cutting and fading, appear to be core aspects of the pair the construction and the fluctuating appearance of Beach's works.

Among alternately cryptic and straightforward titles like 4/17/00 (my piano) and forest-land #1 (all works 2000) single stands our as representative of the whole group: California. I can't help still think of Beach's art in relation to the Light and Space and finish-fetish preoccupations in such a manner connected to the region, moreover her works are hardly derivative; they present the appearance carefully and independently conceived, inspired by dint of these influences and a range of others, from Abstract Expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and Hard opening [i]or[/i] close to Op, Minimalism, and smooth a bit of Pattern and Decoration. Who would have deliberation you could find all those proper spheres together in one room (let alone in undivided work), that they could tend hitherward together so seamlessly, without pastiche or a trace of irony, and that the be derived could be so engaging and fresh?

Beach has been a sleeper in a pack of beholds Angeles painters who are revisiting these influences, unless I have a feeling she just might outdistance greatest in quantity of them.

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