Thoughts That Cure Radically: Kimber Smith 'The Winged Life' James Graham & Sons

Kimber Smith's exhibition of paintings and drawings from the 1960s and 70s feels in its concerns and approach contemporary. The paintings of pyramids, slabs, blobs and squiggles takes primarily from the tradition of French Modernism established by Matisse and Picasso. In their handling and color sense, however, the paintings echo forward to painters who matured in the 70s including Joan Snyder and Mary Heilmann. The painting's disregard for finish and their spare roughness evocate contemporary painters Josh Smith, Richard Aldrich and Elizabeth Neel. The painting's palette of cobalt blue, dioxidine purple, cadmium red yellow and orange, viridian green and ivory black are applied in large washes of acrylic on raw cotton duck canvas. The works on paper, drawn in gouache and ink, parallel the paintings in their brush-marking. Both the paintings and works on paper approximate the force of drawing; the paintings in their slap-dash splatter and the works on paper in their focus on a search for form. Influences and cross pollination abound; the painting can be described as liquid Matisse or the kind of work Clyfford Still would have made if he had a sense of humor.

Kimber Smith was part of a group of American painters and writers living in Paris after the Second World War that included Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, Sam Francis and the poet John Ashbery. In Joe Fyfe's catalogue for the exhibition Ashbery is quoted as calling this group of artists 'apatrides' (stateless) artists who moved away from the United States but did not feel themselves 'expatriates' participating in the leftovers of the ecole de Paris. Regardless, Smith's work has had more success in Europe, France and Switzerland especially, than in New York. Smith's work during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism would have seemed too insouciant for the strenuous seriousness of the Formalist ethos. In the catalogue Smith is quoted as saying that the triangles in his paintings were inspired by the shape of his cat's ears. Further slabs of paint were, according to Smith, reminiscent of piano keys. Smith's painterly vocabulary has its antecedent in Matisse's The Music Lesson of 1917. Matisse, like the best paintings in this exhibition, are able to evaporate in their chromatic humidity while managing to remain rigidly in the viewers attention and memory.