Contributed by Riad Miah / Andrea Belag, in her current exhibition, “Twombly’s Green” at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, uses oil paint as a calligrapher might, employing sweeping gestural marks, scrapes, and wipes, as well as color itself, as her visual vocabulary. The paintings, of course, are not to be “read” in a linear manner but rather to be encountered and experienced.
The title of the exhibition references Cy Twombly‘s use of Hooker’s green in paintings that Belag saw in 2015 at the Menil Collection. Even when sparingly applied, the color anchors each painting, serving as a kind of talisman. Hooker’s green is dark, almost black, reminiscent of dense and overgrown foliage of late summer, but, as she scrapes it into thin layers, it releases luminosity. Her images may bring Willem de Kooning’s late 1950s paintings to mind, although there are more differences than similarities. If his work evokes place through color, gesture, and speed, Belag’s features lyrical efficiency, as a poem might. De Kooning’s paintings invariably showcase the brush and the physicality of mark-making, while Belag downplays these factors by collapsing color and gesture into light and space. Where his opaque colors bounce off one another, Belag nurtures translucency. Her gestures are fast, but they recede by way of scraping, so that they seem to fold and flip in space. Belag’s paintings are not heavily layered or revised and her physical gestures are distinctly economical — another feature of calligraphy.
All the paintings in the exhibition measure 36 x 32 inches, a little longer than an arm’s length, and the sweeps of the mark and scraping approximate a motion generated from elbow to wrist. Their scale is thus smaller than that of de Kooning or, say, David Reed, who operate from shoulder to wrist. Here Twombly may be another point of reference. Belag’s gestures are similar to his in that the physical effort is generated from the body. The paintings share an overall sweep, which approximates a curve or arch, sometimes tight and made in a single gesture, other times open and disjointed. Except in one or two pieces, the gestural strokes touch two or three edges of the canvas. While this lends them stability, leaving one or two edges open also neatly certifies the picture plane as an active site of artistic creation. But it is Belag’s fusion of gesture, light, and color that most distinguishes these strikingly kinetic yet calmly elegant paintings.
“Andrea Belag: Twombly’s Green,” Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth Street, New York, NY. Through April 13, 2024.
About the Author: Artist and educator Riad Miah was born in Trinidad and Tobago and lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited with Lesley Heller Workspace, Rooster Gallery, and Sperone Westwater Gallery. His 2023 solo show was at Equity Gallery in New York.
