Reviews — in brief

A brief look at Jane Fine's recent show at Pierogi
by Dorothy Krasowska

Jane Fine lets order and chaos battle it out in her latest series of drawings and paintings. Her drawings consist of carefree splashes of paint beneath methodical, almost obsessive compositions of black lines. The patterns are a cross between adolescent doodling and 60's psychedelic design. The beautiful pastel drips, which are composed of two to three colors, compliment the simple, organic shapes superimposed upon them. The artist describes the process as, "One minute I am mimicking an anxious Pollock; in the next I feel as if I'm carefully knitting a sweater." But the lines seem are no more controlled than the drips. Because each sketch is like a doodle, the overall outline seems to have no plan or structure. One loop simply merged out of another until a design was complete.

Although the paintings also work on the premise that structure and chaos create better compositions, they are less successful than the drawings. Instead of contrasting rigid outlines with random drizzles, the canvases use a vocabulary of grids versus billowy shapes. The final paintings end up resembling elaborate cakes that are about to tumble over and child-like utopias built on clouds. No balance is struck between order and organization, because the grids are as disorderly as the soft forms. Chaos has definitely taken over in this series. And if there was also a competition between the drawings and the paintings, the drawings have definitely won.

Dorothy Krasowska lives in Brooklyn and writes about art.