The A.I.R. gallery has moved from two-artist to one-artist shows this season, but returned to the earlier format for Maude Boltz and Daria Dorosh. To take Boltz first: there are none of the large free-falling pieces, like trapezes or rope ladders, making long, kinky connections between ceiling and room-space that characterized her last show. The new pieces are smaller and wall-based, showing her acute sense of the relation of free and fixed materials, of loose and supportive forms. Rain Dance, 1973, with its two-story forms and color-dipped dangling strings, is a good example of her sensibility. Though it does not show her gifts fully extended, it reveals the operation of her keen judgment within apparently tousled and casual structures. Daria Dorosh’s watercolors use successive images, because her soft, soft colors, with phantasmal think balloons and fading landscapes, need the reassurance of repetition. Without the echoes one could not be sure of what one was seeing. Her allusions almost elude one owing to her pale hues: The Spirit of the Letter, for instance, shows four period figures reading letters, and the title seems to refer to a book by Jean Leymarie on epistolary genre. The point is made but her delicacy is almost an absence; it is a lyricism on the edge of recognition.

––Lawrence Alloway