REPRINT of a review written by
KRISTINE BROWN / ON ART
on a previous Agneta Falk art exhibit

Orange Red to Bright Blood

Agneta Falk will be showing new paintings at the Focus Gallery beginning on March 7. She has said, "When I write, I paint, and when I paint, I write." Like oracles, poets who paint, and use words as part of their visual work, can both fascinate and frustrate. She fascinates.

These are mysterious and sensuous paintings with a strong physical presence. Unlike Kenneth Patchen and the many poets who privilege the word over the final image and who, at their worst, leave the viewer asking why the poet bothered to paint rather than simply publishing on a white page; and unlike William Blake, who, unable to decide whether to favor the word or the image, muddles and shortchanges both, Falk treats the final image as paramount. The word always serves the final composition, the visual.

The works' presence, their immediacy, is strong though they range in size from less than a foot square to over 4' x 2'. Their textures vary from the fineness of hot pressed paper thinly coated with transparent ink to rough paper loaded with watercolor to the richness of canvas spread with acrylic or oil and collaged with thick paper painted before application.

Black and white, creams, ivories, pale yellows and metallic gold, often accented by rust and aqua, evoke an ancient Egypt modernized or romanized by fuchsia, electric orange, reds from orange red to bright blood red to maroon, and darkened by almost black grays, deep strong blues and an occasional rich golden brown.

The words, written in whites, blacks, blues and rusts, include their own poetry as well as that of Ahkmatova, Pasolini, Kruchenykh, Gogou, Rimbaud, Hirschman, Mallarme and the classical Indian love poets. They appear as blocks of text, areas of pattern, curving, curling, toppling over, sinuous, ribbons and swirls of words sometimes held within boundaries of line or color, but also breaking out, creating their own areas of pattern, twisting around suggestions of figures, creating horizons, making a shimmering shifting ground of words.

The power and protean variety of these shapes might suggest that to decipher them is to discover they have been chosen solely for their appearance, that no relationship of meaning, of contrast, or even of dissonance exists. But her words are carefully chosen to resonate with the visuals. This resonance is always subtle. Even when her abstract expressionism begins to suggest figuration or landscape, obvious correspondences are eschewed.

These words, text, could be graffiti at the end of the world on the wall of a new temple, operating instructions left long ago in a jungle that is now a desert, or messages left for a lover, a perfect platonic other half, not to be born for thousands of years, for ages. Sometimes, as in the wet into wet bleed out of "Heart Beat." the word is abandoned, goes unused, and a zone of even more elemental elegance is entered, opened...