ART REVIEW : THEOBALD’S NEW PAINTINGS ARE ON THE ‘MUST SEE’ LIST

“In my pieces, I work to distill something known rather than perceived,” Gillian Theobald has said with reference to her new paintings, now on view at the Patty Aande Gallery (660 9th Ave.).

For several years, Theobald has used landscape imagery to convey states of the soul, and indeed, what we see in her paintings is like nothing that we have seen before in the physical world, perhaps not even in dreams. They suggest but do not imitate views of great deserts, the Grand Canyon or the polar regions. What we recognize in them intuitively, not rationally, are states of mind and feelings.

The titles are so banally straightforward that you might expect to encounter them in an exhibit of Western art: “River Overlook PM,” “Bend,” “Gorge at Night,” “Fast River.” We recognize river banks, cliffs, waterfalls, canyons. But they are represented with such an economy of means that we could easily read them as pure abstractions.

Through simple but masterful means, Theobald creates works that epitomize a “reductive expressionism.”

The compositions, with as few as half a dozen areas of differing hues, are basic but they possess that justness that all artists aspire to create: nothing can be added, nothing subtracted, nothing altered. The palette is limited to grays, whites, blues, browns and reds. But how satisfying they are. Another color would be an alien element.

All the works combine water with earth and sky. We recognize our environment. But all is ambiguity, an effect accentuated by the shifting of the other-worldly reflected illumination and the indeterminate direction of the water’s flow. Is it receding or advancing? We assume that it is receding into the background. Recognition that the alternative is a possibility is as unsettling as walking backward.

The glaze of Theobald’s enamel pigments enhances the other-worldliness of her visions, distancing them and cooling them, creating a gentle but impermeable barrier between us and them, a demarcation between art and life. Theobald does not seek to overwhelm us, violate us, but to communicate with us directly and intimately.

Her work conveys the sentiments written by German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 70 years ago: “I don’t know whether I can express myself intelligibly. I can only give you an example of what I understand by passivity. It is the ability of so losing one’s own individuality that one can make this contact with others.

“It takes immense effort to achieve this, yet it is achieved without willing it, to some extent unconsciously without one’s having anything to do with it. To create at this stage with whatever means--words or colors or notes--is art. Frequently this relationship is reached only as an aftereffect, sometimes after weeks and months. And then the most powerful things are produced here because feeling is released from specific material limitations.”

Theobald achieves this desired directness of expression through color and form, while exercising a protective restraint.

This is not to say that her works are any less passionate than they have always been. They are even more seductive as visual experiences. Moreover, with the elimination of volcanic flame and cyclone forms that she used in the past, they are no longer threatening.

The exhibit of her new works is a “must see.” It is on view through March 7.