New City
November 1992
Sazama Gallery

Claire Wolf Krantz
Trans/Ports
By Michael A. Weinstein

The root meaning of "metaphor" is to transport. In her current show, "Trans/Ports," Claire Wolf Krantz makes visual metaphors by creating diptychs in which painted surfaces, drawings, and photographs communicate with each other.

Krantz surrounds her black‑and‑white photos and pencil drawings with a swirling painted background that is rife with a subtle play of muted yet vivacious colors. The eye moves among the components of the assemblage, registering harmonies and oppositions of media and meanings.

The work is best when the elements of a piece comment on each other decisively. In "Death of my Studio," we see in the left panel three photographs of the demolition of the building in which Krantz had her studio. The shots are lodged in an inferno of red swirls of paint tinged with green and yellow. In the right panel, a drawing of a gnarled tree that wears its leaves like tresses is enclosed by a forest of green swirls tinged with red. Fire and earth, destruction and growth, and document and fiction reflect on each other in an endless circuit.

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.