In the middle of a welter of conflicted positions Susan Crile reverses the argument made in terms of Terrence La Noue. Her reluctance to choose between representationalism and abstraction leads her to an imagery based on the motifs of the weaving of Persian carpets. The solution, and it is an interesting one, entails flirting with the polemics of the picture plane in a naive way. But the innocence as yet is insufficient evidence to dismiss her painting. Frontality and two-dimensionality are eschewed in favor of the illusion of pile-bucklings and fringed overlappings. The hand is tremulous but capable of finding a high and personal range related to the sherberty palette of Bonnard and much of the thin decorative painting which came out of Impressionism. The reticences are those of an untried talent, unsure of the kind of talent it really is but in its conflict it makes for an unanticipated stopover—Field Illusionism. The evolutionary character of Crile’s young painting—in which the hand is altered from canvas to canvas—makes it unlikely that this halfway house will long be dwelled in.

—Robert Pincus-Witten