Pat Adams: Retrospective
Harriet Zinnes
Courtesy of Zabriskie Gallery
Nothing is left unresolved in the retrospective exhibition of Pat Adams’ paintings now showing in New York City at the Zabriskie Gallery (41 East 57 Street) through March 5, 2005. Care is everywhere but the painterly resolution mystifies with richness of color and secret additions of mica, shells, and sand. Geometric shapes dominate, circles tease the verticals and leave the viewer with the feeling that there is a universe or perhaps a hidden cosmos that delights in titillating forms.
It was fifty years ago that the artist showed her work at the very inception of the Zabriskie gallery. Now with work exhibited at the gallery that was executed as long ago as 1954 and as recently as 2004 the viewer has the privilege of witnessing the painter’s dedication to form. On the surface it is almost coldly rigorous; yet, it reveals a subterfuge of secret harmonies growing out of an artist’s soft, sensitive inward gaze.
Adams has said that her aesthetic quest "is different from that of picturing phenomena." The quest explores "of whatever else the artist may consist, it abounds in restless projective extension; innately it bounds toward the vision of an anticipatory not-as-yet." It is that "not-as-yet" that is the clue to pleasures Pat Adams delivers to the viewer. One looks at, let us say, the painting called "Late, New, Again, Round" of l985 or at "What Follows" of 2003 and then at "Ribbon of Breath" of 1954 (and of course one is always delighted with the artist’s obvious linguistic joy in naming her works) and one knows that Adams is an artist who sees that behind the cuts and jagged edges, the disorderly rectangles and circles and blobs of nature there is always an undisguised, even if arbitrary, happenstance of design.
