Summer Brooms

Cat Balco, Large Red Beach, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. All images courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art/© Cat Balco, 2019.

Exhibition Review

Cat Balco
Rick Wester Fine Art
526 West 26th Street, Suite 417
November 7, 2019 – January  25, 2020

The works in Cat Balco’s current exhibition, “My Exploding Stars,” are an antidote to the horror of our current political situation: they present a meditative space that is buzzing with positive energy. They also show a significant shift from the artist’s earlier paintings of just this year, center-focused abstractions made up of handmade strokes in pastel-colored patterns which Balco called “Stars.”

Balco says she developed the recent compositions by zooming in on sections of her previous  paintings, yet the strokes are so enlarged that it is not easy to find a direct correspondence. Made using push brooms, in a move reminiscent of Ed Clark, the new paintings are built with foot-wide or larger slabs of color. They are almost landscapes, but can also be seen as purely indexical marks on canvas, a record of their own making.

Cat Balco, Wide Open Angles, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.

An obvious influence is Franz Kline, who famously blew up his ink drawings with a projector to arrive at his signature black and white abstractions. Here, Balco has figured out how to make a Kline work in saturated color. Her paintings also have an affinity with Frankenthaler’s vivid late-1960’s compositions, and with de Kooning’s Parkway Series, or his Door To The River.

Cat Balco, Blue Diamond, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

The exhibition consists of twelve medium to large paintings, all square, ranging from 40”x40” to 72”x72”. These ambitious body-sized works grab your eye and then don’t let go. And the bigger they are, the better. Diagonal strokes suggest a vortex pushing back into space, and many of the top layered strokes are at put on at angles to the square. (Three of the paintings have “triangle” in the title.) Occasionally Balco uses color to create a drop shadow, a technique that appears often in the Star paintings. This has the effect of teasing open what remains a determinedly shallow depth.

Color in the paintings is summery, with super-saturated reds and yellows, pinks and oranges, cooled by medium and light blues. Titles like Large Red Beach, Summer Rectangles and Red Blue Sail conjure a seaside mood, and triangles of blue often evoke water. The brushstrokes, or broomstrokes, are intensely visible, and strokes with splatters at the edges can be quite moving. Transparency is also effectively used. These paintings are performed, expressed, but not contrived.

Cat Balco, Red, Blue Yellow Triangles, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.

Balco has said, as quoted in the gallery press release, that she tries to make the works in nine or fewer strokes, and one wonders if there is some relation to “Seven Plus or Minus Two,” the number of items we can keep in short term memory at one time (the reason for seven digits in phone numbers). Maybe nine strokes is the largest number of elements we can simultaneously keep in mind while looking at a painting. There is a great deal of hope in Balco’s paintings, communicated in the intensity of the colors and the power of the strokes. I walked through the gallery drunk with a kind of joy.

--Jeff Frederick

Cat Balco, Red Blue Sail 2019, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.