Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is popularly epitomized by her monumental masterwork The Rose (1958-66), whose counterpart, The Jewel (1959), is on permanent display at LACMA. It’s rather misleading, for her diverse oeuvre encompasses far more than just those heftily textured behemoths. Billy Al Bengston once declared, “Never just look at one of Jay’s paintings.” With over 20 paintings, “The Texture of Color” at Marc Selwyn Fine Art offers an inkling of DeFeo’s talent for crystallizing feeling and evoking spatiality via compendiously lyrical small-scale abstractions. These little paintings could be fancied as X-ray visions into facets of The Jewel or crevices of The Rose, as if the opaque, muted impastos of DeFeo’s more famous paintings harbored hidden realms of vibrant color. Though seemingly nonobjective, certain passages, such as a sky-like expanse in Homage to Thomas Albright No. 4 (1983), give the uncanny impression of receding deeply in space: an illusionistic effect heightened by contrast with impastoed strokes and bare paper highlighting the painting’s actual surface flatness. Viscous brushwork swirls and protrudes with meditative delicacy, evoking rocks, mountains and water. Alabama Hills No. 8: Arctic Sunset (1986) appears as the summit of a cinder cone. With murky shades of cobalt, an untitled painting from 1983 brings to mind a raft buffeted by crashing waves over the wreckage of a sinking boat. Several untitled pictures resembling corners in rooms (example above) recall Francis Bacon’s claustrophobic interiors. Each of DeFeo’s paintings presents a uniquely evocative existential vista to which photographic reproduction does little justice.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 S. Santa Monica Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
Show runs through Sep. 5