In the midst of fancy optical tactics, collegiate post-Surrealism, structures of minimal geometry, Jacqueline Gourevitch’s cloud paintings at the Roko Gallery cast cool shadows. While hardly an innovator, Gourevitch is nevertheless an artist of diffident conviction and sensibility, who continues a tradition come down to us from Constable and the English water colorists, with occasional refurbishings at Boudin, at Monet, and the Ruskin “Of The Truth Of Skies.” The list suggests a forthrightness and vigorousness that is not Gourevitch’s stock in trade; a pleinairiste Redon perhaps is the apposite simile.
Choosing modest dimensions, Gourevitch’s clouds appear to expand beyond the stretcher’s vertical and horizontal incisions. Seemingly, they enframe a continuous and delicately surfaced space which shimmers and oscillates like the citric stratifications of a late Bonnard drained of color. Gourevitch is no colorist but a tonalist meanly gifted with a fine graphic sense.
The self-evident achievements of the cloud paintings are compromised by Gourevitch’s franker landscapes, that is, in those paintings wherein the horizon re-appears. (Of course, the missing horizon of the cloud paintings links her to late Monet.) In the landscapes the brush strokes are more agitated, less controlled or pondered, more expressionistic. The landscape elements are summarily indicated and the evocativeness of the clouds is revoked in favor of the topographic keepsake. To my mind, the Ruskinian delicacy of the clouds—the exceptional relationships between pale and resonant blues and oyster greys, the painstaking discovery of oddly barbed shapes—suggest a more eternalized locus, a geography of the imagination that is preferable to the straight landscape with its “here is the field, there is the furrow, here the stile, there the house.” The cloud pictures carry the exhibition with their density sensations, their swellings and traceries, their breathing, all rendered in a singularly effective way. Gourevitch climbs with a heavy pack of sensibility on her back and still manages to rise above the showy, deadening refinement that has already immobilized a battalion of similarly inclined nostalgics.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
