Gutmann-Capri 03

Gutmann - Le Passeggiate Promenade

 

Elana Gunman
"Places"
February 8-March 9, 2002


Perimeter Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in its new Chelsea location of paintings by Elana Gutmann. Gutmann, who has shown at
Perimeter's Chicago gallery since 1995, here extends her exploration of liminal form, using veils and scrims of scrubbed yet vivid color to evoke "places"
both insubstantial and immediate. Manipulating each layer of pigment through alterations of viscosity and tone, she creates topographies of shape and
value that insinuate, but simultaneously destabilize, a sense of landscape.

These experiential locations emerge from a depth of field intuited physically by the viewer , yet contradicted by the frequent use of diptych format-which splits and compartmentalizes the images-and by the hard, cool surface of the panels themselves. Gutmann invites the eye to wanderinto unlimited and luscious space, only to lure the viewer's attention back to the smooth flatness of the paint. Herexactingly prepared surfaces-in this case,wood panels sealed with the traditional gesso mixture of marble dust, titanium white pigment, gypsum, and rabbit-skin glue-allow the pigment to hoveragainst rather than to saturate the support, establishing a dynamic between ecstatic dissolve and knowing restraint. Whisked from a reverie of totalaccess, we find ourselves once more at a remove from the realm of Gutmann's gestures, as if the calligraphic squiggles that often float in the foreground ofthese works had nimbly reasserted their autonomy. Swooping, stuttering, massing, fading, these marks never quite play figure to some distant ground. Buttheir subtle theatricality orders each composition, activating the apparent tranquility of the "scene" and interrupting the unity of billowing color. As if Chineselandscape had tarted itself up to handle a brighter, hotter palette, like Turner but with the romantic operatics pared away, Gutmann's images are bothlavishly evocative and quietly, almost preternaturally private.

In the works on paper included here-both oil on gessoed paper and watercolor-kinship with the paintings is expressed in terms of place and space.Tecnically simpler and more immediate, however, these implied vistas paradoxically feel more immense.

Elana Gutmann has worked extensively with master printmakers Editions Cillart in Paris, and-in addition to numerous exhibitions in this country-has shown
in Paris, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Stockholm, Valencia (Spain), Pescara (Italy), and Saigon (Viet Nam). Her work is represented in the collections of the
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the University of Chicago, as well as private and corporate collections worldwide.