Contributed by Leslie Roberts / In “Polychrome,” Bernay Fine Art presented paintings by three painters – Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky – who all create striking chromatic relationships by organizing color in structures of parallel strips. The show makes clear how much lurks beneath these general descriptions. It’s a pleasure to study these paintings side by side and consider each artist’s singular use of color and paint.
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Audrey Stone works with restrained palettes of two or three hues, painted in thin strips that gradually modulate from very dark to very light. Stone’s surfaces are meticulously painted but still breathe, due in part to slight rippling irregularities in the dark-light sequences. Value contrasts at edges make for a fluting effect up close. Stone’s finely stepped gradients produce blurs, atmospheres, sometimes a sense of movement. And they pointedly evoke light. No Horizon / Lilac Haze suggests a twilight landscape, divided by a flutter rather than a clear edge. Open Promise moves from full hues on one side of each panel to near-white on the other, suggesting the glow of an incandescent tube. Ghost Song has a similar palette, but the greens and blues are interior and small, surrounded by modulated expanses of gray, yielding gentle hollows and pearly luster.
Like all Stone’s larger works, Open, Open is a modular diptych, in an arrangement derived from myriad symmetrical pairings in her studio – mirrored, stacked, inverted. (She may rearrange the panels of a given painting yet again in a future installation.) It looks nearly monochrome, dominated by cool viridian green. With this minimal palette, Stone creates drama, partly by introducing a complementary hue in minute amounts. The deep blue-green gives way to a slightly pinkish gray, and the painting’s dark center recedes inward to an inky, cavernous depth.
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