by John Mendelsohn
What need do we have for words when we have paintings, particularly the kind of lyrical and abstract works that Danielle Frankenthal offers us in her current exhibition? These are often extravagant, gestural works that are abundant in high color and visual movement. What challenges the writer is to order his thoughts about paintings that seems to ask us to forsake cognition in favor of pure sensation.
But despite the pleasures of innocent, sensuous looking that these paintings afford, our enquiring mind is nonetheless activated. First, there is the question of the unusual support of these works – square sheets of clear acrylic resin that are joined into a single box. Acrylic paint and oil stick have been applied to the inner and outer surfaces of the plastic panels, resulting in a kind of painterly diorama or stage set that deploys multiple scrims. The effect is to deconstruct the traditional layering of a painting into discrete planes, that coalesce into a comprehensible, if unstable image.
This effect of suspended marks is essential to these paintings, creating a kind of holographic presence in which the painted gestures shift from planar to dimensional space. Our second question is how this curious phenomenon is part of Frankenthal’s expressive endeavor. The exhibition has work from two series, Clouds and Gardens. The former benefits from the floating quality of the multiple planes of depths in the paintings, to evoke fugitive color and atmospheric vapors.
A prime example is Mist 2, with its upper expanse the color of agitated fog, above a lower, coppery register. In the Clouds paintings, at times light is conjured literally through the use of pearlescent and metallic pigments. The many qualities of light constitute a continual focus in Frankenthal’s work, here intimating the diffused illumination of dawn.
A painting of the Gardens series, L’Apresmidi d’une Faune, is a diptych whose title simultaneously suggests the Mallarmé poem, the Debussy symphonic work which it inspired, and the ballet of the same name by Nijinsky. The double painting repeats, with variations, a pastoral setting with a mottled sky, a gilded glow of light, and a violent red passage that suggest the satyr’s sensual exploits. Leaping arabesques in black oil stick capture the sense of intoxicated dance.
Garden 3, with its turbulent sky, rising land, and turquoise vegetation, is the most recognizable landscape of the series. It becomes a terra incognita by an overlay of wild, wind-blown lines and the use of phosphorescent acrylic resin. This glow-in-the-dark effect reminds us that this artist is both a seeker after original expression, and part of a lineage of painting that draws its inspiration from nature, stretching back to Monet, and moving forward through Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.
Danielle Frankenthal: Playing with Light, Curated by Lilly Wei, through April 5, 2025, L’Espace Gallery, New York, 524 W. 19 St., New York, NY