SALANDER O’REILLY GALLERY
REVIEW
JUNE 15, 1997
MARGARET SHEFFIELD
Anne Peretz’ forthcoming exhibited of new paintings at Salander-O’Reilly shows her addition of a new mode—the epic—to her already existing modes of romantic, classic, and lyrical painting.
The five new triptychs were painted in the last few years. One was inspired by Moroccan landscape, the others by Cape Cod. Two of the triptychs, Dune Storm and Marsh Triptych are complex modalities of light and color depicting water and sky. The subtle underpainting makes their spatial expanses read not as empty space, but as dense, tactile bodies of water and air.
In Dune Storm, the artist uses a swashbuckling repertoire of expressionist techniques—dabs, spatters, splashes and drips in a palette of grays, blacks, ochres and cobalt greens. With the feeling of a 100-mile-an-hour wind blowing through it, Dune Storm gives nature’s ferocity a palpable beauty. This physicality together with the precipitous perspective of the triptych format, plunges the viewer into the storm’s midst.
Marsh Triptych is a tour de force relating parts to the whole in a startling, yet harmonious way. The middle unit is an enlarged close up, focusing on an explosion of germinating forms at the bottom of a marsh. To see the two flanking panels, and the unity of the triptych, one must retreat to a distance where the entire 3-part marsh seems to have grown mysteriously out of the central panel.
The brilliant composition makes the elegant spare verticals of reeds on each side panel extend on the diagonal dramatically leading the viewer’s eye left and right into the grandly infinite space.
The most radical departure from the artist’s former chroma and motifs is Atlas Mountains, a triptych inspired by Morocco. It has a lush, yet limited palette of ochres and myriad greens, dotted with the ubiquitous arkan tree. Peretz underpaints in a seductive pinkish ochre, then brushes lash-like lines in a dark umber which undulate in different patterns across the three panels, criss-crossing and interlocking to evoke the rhythm of the mountain ranges.
This triptych is vigorously animated by the graphic music of its mountain rhythms, just as Raphael’s paintings are animated by the unique rhythms of the Umbrian hills.
In the classic/romantic mode, Peretz’s three pond paintings are poetic masterworks. Her massing of trees conveys lyric passion, and her style fuses a bravura evening light and brushwork with solidity of form. Tone is as important as color and line here, and Peretz shows an extreme sensitivity to mood and atmosphere.
Monet may be a more central influence for Peretz than Cezanne, but one strongly feels that this painter’s mind is closest to Cezanne. Peretz’ painterly mind is both peptic and analytic, and these paintings reveal a quiet ecstasy for the natural world. And, in her mastery of monumental trees at dusk, he poet has captured her own dark sublime in Nature.
