ComLooking Forward and Looking Back: The Art of Cecily Kahn
By Julie Karabenick
Cecily Kahn. Reach 30
Cecily Kahn is an abstract painter who for the past twelve years has been engaged in a serious dialogue with American nonobjective art of the 1930s and 40s. This is a dialogue free of irony or parody; rather, the spirit of engagement is at once passionate and intelligent. Kahn writes that she feels compelled to explore the forms and shapes that move her. She believes that through an open, yet focused, process which embraces both opposition and synthesis, accident and intuitive judgment, familiar art historical forms and structures may be renewed, elaborated, and reinvested with vitality and meaning. A journey of intense pictorial research has yielded a body of recent work that feels fresh, exuberant, and distinctly her own Kahn’s work is striking in the richness and diversity of its forms and her handling of them. Her longstanding use of flat rectilinear shapes and planes that overlap and intersect in a shallow space recalls early American modernist experimentation with Synthetic Cubism. Yet in her most recent work, Kahn increasingly distances herself from this source. For example, in Reach (2004), Kahn’s forms have become larger and less fragmented. Each boldly asserts its individuality through pronounced differences in contour, color, texture, and directional movement. Referencing the organic forms of Arp and Mir�, Kahn juxtaposes looping biomorphic shapes against the geometric. These organic shapes also proclaim their unique identities: some are elongated and graceful, others are squat and jaunty. In Spark (2004), three biomorphs distinct in color and shape help establish the celebratory mood of the piece. A third prominent member of Kahn’s lexicon includes more amorphous areas of thinned paint typically coaxed into networks of projections through judicious tilting of the canvas. These unfurling skeins may extend outward in delicate, lacey webs or settle into more compact, assertive forms.
The space in Kahn’s recent work is generally shallow, but often ambiguous. Forms overlap, interlock and interpenetrate. Firm-edged forms on a single plane appear to jostle for position while gossamer texture-shapes weave under and over their neighbors. Defying an orderly recession into space, Kahn’s forms energetically push forward as often as they retreat. This push-pull is often countered by strong and varied diagonal thrusts, resulting in an animated, polyvalent whole. As forms partially conceal and reveal one another, we are drawn in, curious as to what lies hidden from view. Often, the frontmost shape plays a dual role of sentry and host, momentarily stopping the eye and asserting the flatness of the space as it also beckons us in to explore this intriguing pictorial world.
An obvious question is how Kahn achieves visual coherence in paintings where individual voices clamor for attention. She writes that her work "involves the process of integrating different elements to coexist peacefully and easily within a composition." Kahn begins a work by pouring paint onto the canvas and allowing it to pool and run. While she courts accident and spontaneity, the underlying coherence of her work reflects a deliberative process she calls "editing" wherein essential elements are carefully arranged for maximum effect and inessential elements are eliminated. Although Kahn at times allows the nature of her materials to have their way, her work ultimately reflects an intuitive sense of color and composition finely honed by eighteen years as an abstract painter.
In her earlier work, the feeling of struggle involved in uniting her diverse pictorial elements was palpable. However, having surrendered neither the range nor the distinctiveness of her formal means, Kahn’s recent work achieves visual coherence with a new sense of fluidity, grace, and lightness. Color harmonies and a sense of shared energy often act to unify the work. Larger, less fragmented shapes bound together by overlap or intersection likewise contribute to the sense of wholeness. However, consistent with Kahn’s appetite for visual diversity, no single set of rules or namable order announces itself in this masterful orchestration. And, though Kahn appreciates paintings that come easily, she prefers works which pose challenging pictorial problems that she "gets to chew on" for extended periods.
Kahn reports that she was profoundly moved when, as a nineteen-year-old, she spent a summer cataloguing the works on paper of her grandmother, Alice Trumbull Mason. Mason, a nonobjective artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists, wrote in a 1938 exhibition catalogue for the group: "We look for nothing mystical or dreamlike but the magic of the work itself. Abstract art demands an awareness of the intrinsic use of materials and a fuller employment of these means which build a new imaginative world by using them for their own potential worth." Seriously engaged with the early American abstract art of this period, Kahn writes that Mason’s "freedom and careful technique combined with the sensuality of her work is the exciting balancing act I’m still drawn to." It’s a balancing act that Kahn performs with aplomb.
