Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Harriet Shorr at Cheryl Pelavin

Harriet Shorr at Cheryl Pelavin
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Nathan Kernan

Antoine Watteau has been creatively reinterpreted in recent years by artists as disparate as Lucian Freud, Jane Freilicher and, now, Harriet Shorr. In her third show at Pelavin (all works 2003 or 2004), Shorr expanded the parameters of her still-life paintings to include specific references to Watteau's masterpiece, once called the Embarkation for Cythera. In her own Embarkation, she paints the reflection of an enlarged reproduction of Watteau's work, inverted in a sheet of black Plexiglas. The Watteau, with its familiar imagery, reads as a reflection in water, while resting on a nearby grassy bank--in "real" space--lie a wreath of spring flowers and a pale blue ribbon, betokening the recent presence, perhaps, of one of the characters. The two seemingly contradictory realities, spatially and temporally irreconcilable but thematically linked, invite viewers to embark on their own reveries regarding memory, narrative, history and the nature of perception.

Motifs of the fete galante turn up, as well, in several paintings that include a group of broken 18th-century porcelain figurines (lutenist, shepherdess, etc.), lying, for example, on a piece of green brocade or next to a cracked mirror. Shorr's wit, light approach and mastery of touch, scale and color balance the figurines' rather foppish preciosity. They are possibly used most successfully in a series of monotypes, where the relatively loose handling and brushy texture lead to slight but somehow welcome distortions.

There are no direct 18th-century references in two of the largest paintings in the show, though the fascinating and impressive Picnic with Plums is composed as a watery reflection similar to that in Embarkation. The inverted image of a tablecloth and a glass fruit bowl is scattered with fruits and flowers placed on the dark mirrored surface, so that the distinction between levels is very hard to make out. The flowers--two long-stemmed pink roses, some blue columbines--continue the elegiac mood of the "Cythera" paintings.

Paradoxically, it's the very lucidity of Shorr's best paintings that can cause one to question what is really there, or what one is really seeing, or possibly not seeing. Girl with Gazing Ball brings a kind of Plato's Cave effect into play. The entire painting, an outdoor still life, is overlaid with jagged, gesturing shadows of unseen trees, while the gazing ball of the title, sitting with potent modesty on a small base on a picnic table, encompasses a reflection of the much larger summer scene. This shows not only the shadow-casting overhead branch, but a vast landscape of grassy field, far horizon, billowing clouds, a rose in a vase, the eaves of a house. The mesmerizingly lovely Brocade gives as much weight to intangible shadows and reflections as to the physical objects--flowers and vases on a figured cloth. A spray of green leaves embodies and radiates light against the relatively flat and abstracted background of a blooming meadow; shadows on the brocade reverberate with preternatural energy.

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