ArtSeen
Pat Passlof
Elisabeth Harris

Despite a rough passage through postmodern theory, the grid has made another strong appearance at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in the paintings of Pat Passlof. Her most recent series, variations on a theme entitled Eighth House, relies heavily on the grid for structure. The best work in the show proves the staying power of this tried-and-true fundamental of painting.
Passlof hasn’t always been a grid painter or even an abstract painter. She came by her current motif honestly from a loose figurative style in the early 1990s to a less strictly structured abstraction in the late 1990s. It seems to be only in the new millennium that she decided to focus more exclusively on the theme. Even now, it appears, she hesitates. “Eighth House #6” and “Eighth House #10” are among the paintings that reveal this, a meandering abstraction that never seems to settle on a composition. The former is composed of squiggly yellow forms in a cobalt sea of paint. It reminds me of John Marin’s half-hearted stabs at abstraction. The latter looks like a loose Sam Francis—all color, no form.
When Passlof insists more staunchly on the grid, she produces impressive paintings. Her wet-in-wet style works off the grid’s rigidity. She groups thick lines in sets of three and abuts horizontal sets with vertical sets to create a tension of opposites. She’s never strict about the compositions, and a solitary horizontal line or truncated vertical is commonplace. In my favorite painting, “Eighth House #15,” black lines tile the plane in a somber ochre ground. Less imposing but equally large is “Eighth House #13,” in which the cad yellow lines are quickened by the painting’s flickering brushwork.
There is something totemic about these larger grid paintings. In Passlof’s work, the grid is a foil for form and for the properties of paint far more than it is a conceptual end. Her repetition of sets and use of the grid does not call to mind the cerebral work of artists such as Ryman or LeWitt. Sean Scully’s painting seems a more apt source of comparison. One is convinced that Passlof cares deeply for her lines and what they might represent. Her tendency to oppose these lines in a fragile balance seems elemental to her thinking, inseparable from her drive to paint. When a painter breathes new life into an old motif, she makes it her own. In that sense, Passlof is painting the first grid.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Grace Notes: Pam Tanowitz and Simone Dinnerstein’s New Work for Goldberg Variations
By Rachel StoneFEB 2020 | Dance
The ushers at the New York City premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and pianist Simone Dinnersteins New Work for Goldberg Variations at The Joyce Theater warn me that the program is 75 minutes75 minutes!with no intermission. Its possible they have to tell me this, but either way, the length of Bachs Goldberg Variations (which, apocrypha alleges, he composed in 1741 as an anti-Scheherazade to help an insomniac count finally sleep) intimidates.

Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings
By Jonathan GoodmanDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Tom Sachs, in a mid-career showhis first at Acquavella Galleriesis offering handmade paintings aligned with classic American, mostly commercial iconography: a reproduction of the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, the McDonald's Golden Arches, an American flag. These images are so ubiquitous as to have taken on definitive status, giving them an authority nearly ethical in their quality; all this despite the fact that Sachss paintings are mostly of logos of things to be sold.
Pat Passlof: The Brush is the Finger of the Brain
By Eleanor HeartneyNOV 2019 | ArtSeen
What comes through in these paintings is a radiant pictorial intelligence, a questing curiosity about what paint can do and a willingness to take formal risks.
Suzan Frecon: oil paintings
By Alfred Mac AdamOCT 2020 | ArtSeen
With the nine oil paintings currently on view at David Zwirner, Suzan Frecon moves into what we might call the classical phase of her career: the moment when she marshals, with supreme ease, every aspect of her previous work into a grand summary.