Judy Pfaff’s recent show featured five major wall reliefs (all 2018) that resemble discrete exhibitions unto themselves. The series is titled “Quartet,” with works numbered one through four and a fifth designated Quartet + 1. Demonstrating the artist’s distinctive merger of painting and sculpture, these assemblages—which average some ten by fourteen feet and bear elements that extend up to five feet into the gallery space—feature rhythmical arrangements of found objects and items made by Pfaff against backgrounds of digitally abstracted photographic imagery mounted on fiberboard panels. Conflict between technology and the environment, artifice and nature, seems to be a theme of the works, which combine melted plastic buckets and pictures of flowers, wire fencing and biomorphic forms, geometric patterns and expressive painterly gestures.
Pfaff challenges the viewer’s perceptive faculties by producing compositions that conflate foreground and background, and that thwart any decisive focal point and even a sense of gravity. Clashing colors and discordant shapes contribute to an anarchic effect, yet a sense of harmony ultimately prevails in each work. In Quartet One, horizontal bands of about a dozen colorful translucent acrylic strips hem in a gathering of large circular shapes set against a field of swirling floral and vegetal forms. A white fluorescent light placed behind a yellow paper lantern at center left gives the already luminous assemblage an ethereal glow.
