Chicago Tribune
November 20, 1992
Sazama Gallery

From the ashes, Krantz creates art
Trans/Ports, Claire Wolf Krantz
by David McCracken

About the same time as the River North fire that destroyed a dozen or so galleries, another building went up in flames, in what is now called River West, near the Lake Street elevated train tracks. It housed not only a small manufacturer or two, but a theatrical scene shop and a handful of artists' studios. One of those who lost a good deal of artwork was Claire Wolf Krantz, and that devastation forms the ostensible subject one of her recent mixed‑media pieces at Sazama Gallery.

All of them situate one or more black‑and‑white photographs or drawings within a mid to large‑size canvas; around that image swirls atmospheric painted surfaces with color that often evokes what is depicted in the image. Such is the case with "The Death of My Studio," which pairs two photographs of the burned‑out structure being demolished along with a drawing of a tree. Leafy sweeps of green surround the latter, while the studio is framed by flaming strokes of red and orange. “The fire”, said Krantz, "was awful. It took me a few years to process it. Now it also comes out in oblique ways sometimes peeking out of a little section of painting."

That depiction is only a springboard for more complex ideas, says Krantz, who wants to confront the polarities of nature and culture, and "the fact that experience is neither in society nor in the person, but is a tension between those two and other factors. I've been interested in how you put things together, and that putting together is where the meaning is."

In this series of works, Krantz sets up contrasts between the imagery ‑‑ usually hard‑edged, geometric and linear forms such as railroad tracks, abandoned d bridges, the Sears Tower ‑- and the emotionality of the painting. She notes that "photos, are assumed' to be 'real,' whereas an artist's brushstrokes are seen as indicative of emotional, inner states." The truth, she says, lies somewhere in between, and she lassos together these works with slender, linear rays that traverse the surface of the painting, cutting angles and bouncing off the border.

Religious associations creep in too, but never explicitly: from a trip to France, a photograph of trees taken from behind the cathedral at Chartres; an arched entryway that one later learns is from a cloister near Arles, these in a work called "Constructions of a Different Order." "I'm an agnostic," said Krantz, yet I keep looking at religious images and thinking about them as things that people construct to make their lives livable."

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.