New Art Examiner
January 1993
Sazoma Gallery

Claire Wolf Krantz
TransPorts
By Kristen Brooke Schleifer

On one level, Claire Wolf Krantz's latest landscapes are meditations on the dichotomies between city and country, industry and nature. By juxtaposing images of the Chicago sky line or a cavernous European train station with pictures of trees and water, Krantz seems to assume an ecological stance by questioning ourplace in  the environment. Krantz is also an art critic, however, and her brand of “environmentalism" is not about conservation, but perception. "TransPorts," the title of her one‑person show, becomes a conscious reiteration of Postmodernism's call for pluralism. Her large diptychs, combining abstract and expressionistic brushwork with photographed and drawn views, uses the values traditionally ascribed to each medium (paint = emotional gesture, graphite = subjective study, photography = objective reportage) to express one's multiple experiences of place.

Krantz builds each piece according to this formal code. Blush strokes and color signify the emotional and sensual, undulating like water in “Chicago River/ North Branch” or roiling like flames behind a photograph of burnt‑out buildings in the left panel of “Death of My Studio.” In the latter, the photograph is recorded reality: the grim dispassionate evidence of loss. In the right panel, a sketch of flourishing trees is set into a painted background of rich greens ‑ hope for the future, or a vision of a kinder, gentler act of nature. A thin gold line angles across the two panels, putting them together into an organic cycle of' destruction and rebirth, of nature and man in constant creative opposition. The line is also a reminder that these technically distinct elements, potentially independent works of' art themselves, are merely pieces of a bigger picture. All these “parts" ‑‑ painting, drawing, photograph; subjective and objective ‑‑ must be considered in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the whole.

These llines, which zigzag across all the paintings in "Transports," are ultimately didactic. They disturb the abstract reverie and call attention to the painting as a rational construction rather than a spontaneous, emotional response. . They are metaphors for the once rigid split between artistic disciplines, when the uses and meanings of each medium were defined and uncontested. At the same time, they are threads of synthesis, shifting and crossing these established boundaries, leading us through different visual doorways to a more multifaceted (and therefore, more accurate) vision of the whole. "TransPorts" is an aesthetically appealing visual essay on a familiar theme: how cultural constructs ‑‑ be they skyscrapers or theory -- mediate our understanding of being in the world.     

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.