Description:

Gianna Commito
Ohio, New York, (B. 1976)
geometric abstract, 2015
watercolor and casein on paper
Signed verso.

Exhibited: Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY

Biography from the Archives of askART: The following exhibitions review, by Roberta Smith, is from The New York Times, January 22, 2015, Art & Design section.

Gianna Commito is not alone in pursuing geometric painting on a small scale. (Tomma Abts is probably her best-known fellow traveler.) But in her second solo show at the Rachel Uffner Gallery, Ms. Commito continues to clarify her territory. She favors increasingly elaborate and compressed compositions of intersecting shards, bands and recurring stripes in medleys of softened related colors: The reds and pinks with gray and black of Drisko,"for example, or the blues and greens with ocher of Chestnut, one of the show's standouts.

The effect is of looking into a broken kaleidoscope, its elements askew in a shallow space. Sense cannot be made of this carefully worked out confusion and the shadowy hall-of-mirrors puzzles it creates, but the modest scale keeps the eye engaged, on intimate terms. And each painting seems to have a different spatial conundrum, a different array of entrances and blockages, which is no mean trick.

An engaging confusion of historical references adds to the works' pleasures. Ms. Commito paints with casein, which creates a suitably dry, matte surface for her fresco palette. Formally, she builds on the legacies of Cubism and Precisionism, bringing them into the present with perhaps unconscious help from the layered geometric figures of Jacob Lawrence and early Philip Guston (like Performers, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

And let's not forget that repeating stripes are among the hallmarks of midcentury abstraction, which used them almost invariably to expel spatial illusion from the canvas. That's one tired convention that Ms. Commito has definitely kissed goodbye.

  • Dimensions: 15"H x 11 1/4"W(sight), 18"H x 14"W(frame)
  • Medium: watercolor and casein on paper

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