New Art Examiner
January 1987

Claire Wolf Krantz
Abstractions from Landscape

ARC Gallery
by Sue Taylor

A large, six-panel painting in shades of deep blue, green, and molten red formed the centerpiece of Claire Wolf Krantz's exhibition "Abstractions from Landscape." Alive with color and vivid brushstrokes, the polyptych olmost pulsates with tensions -- between the regular geometry of its format and the organic shapes that swirl over its surface, between containment and expansion, structure and motion. Titled Van Eyck's Cosmos, Updated, the painterly ensemble constitutes and overt, imaginative gloss on the Ghent Altarpiece. But in an era of fragmentation and flux, so pholosophicaly and psychologically estranged from the holistic 15-century world-view embodied in Van Eyck's retable, Krantz has of necessity supplanted the majestic deësis, angel choirs, and mystic lamb with anxious, searching forms that signal contemporary undertainty and doubt.

Although she acknowledges the eclipse of an old belief system, structured around a repressive but reassuring spiritual and social hierarch, Krantz does not dwell in brooding, existential despair. The energy encoded in her long, curling brushstrokes, the radiant glow of those swelling oragne-rad and crimson shapes suggest that some kind of spiritual power still inhabits the world. Her intention, I think, parallels Van Gogh's in Starry Night, painted when the erstwhile preacher had relinquished organized religion and found a solution to his spiritual dilemma -- not in nihilism but in a passionate, pantheistic reverence for nature.

Krantz's devotion to landscape thus seems a logical outgrowth of her philosophical groping. And just as she transforms Van Eyck's fixed cosmos into a shifting, surging, abstract field, her lyrical visions of nature are informed by a sensitivity to the impermanence and mutability of our physical world. In the ancient landforms that inspire her, the hills and drumlins, crevasses and valleys, she sees the inevitability of change beneath the appearance of solid, static matter. Her focus is always the earth, especially those aspects which find poetic equivalences in anatomy -- in living, breathing shape and substance. In drawings like Banana Flower and Purple Mountains, for example, gentle undulations, clustered spheres, folds, and tunnel-like spaces suggest both geological and organic, even visceral formations.

A beautiful pastel triptch titled Puye captures a sense of change, of time unfolding, through color as well as movement. From left to right, the three drawings -- blue-green, red, and gray respectively -- represent a seasonal or life cycle youth, ripe maturity, old age and death, a lovely reprise of the cliched convention of the three ages of woman. The voluptuous, embracing forms, somewhat reminiscent of Frank Piatek's writing tubes, are build of thousands of discrete, parallel strokes, creating the impression of luxuriant growth -- of grass, perhaps, or hair. Moreover, each color of the triad is the sum of a viariety of hues; the gray, on close inspection, reveals individual marks of peach, white, orange, brown, ecru, red, green, and blue.

The shimmering, evanescent quality Krantz attains in these pastel and Prismacolor drawings seem to be so perfectly congruent with their content that their aesthetic power outshines that of her paintings. The very palpability of the oils, the ponderous physicality of the brushstrokes, though all in motion, give the paintings a kind o stolidness which the more delicate works on paper transcend. Fragile as emotions, ephemeral as life itself, these exquisite drawings represent the very height of Claire Krantz's easthetic achievement to date.

Sue Taylor is a contributing editor of the NAE and an art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times

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.