ART IN AMERICA

PIEROGI

Winning but uneven, the paintings and drawings (all 2008 and ’09) in “Glad All Over,” Jane Fine’s fourth solo here, displayed the artist’s quirky touch, antic if sometimes arcane iconography and a few too many antecedents that were less than fully digested.  A brainy artist, Fine is well-versed in the dialogue between abstraction and figuration, and keen to participate in it. Over the Hump (acrylic on canvas, 78 by 54 inches) depicts, in somber purples, greens and alizarin, a monumental heap of her favored goofy motifs – mushrooms, microphones, gun barrels, wooden planks and less readily identifiable curiosities – crowned with an enormous cherry sprouting still more planks. It is as if Guston, Oldenburg and R. Crumb got together to play exquisite corpse after nicking Rothko’s palette. Though lovely, three drawings in colored pencil, among them Victory Garden (30 by 22 inches), made Fine’s influences even plainer.

The artist is in her comfort zone in A Fly Buzzed (30 by 24 inches), executed on wood panel. Here she augmented oozing puddles of tinted, marbleized acrylics with my black-ink marker notations: pretzel flowers, smoking cannons, bulging biomorphic silhouettes. She’s at the top of her game in Fist Date (24 by 30 inches), in which two awkward lovebirds attempt a walk on the beach. One is a bit too animated, a mass of mechanisms and mannerisms. The other, chunky and stiff, gamely tries to keep up and stay cool. Their story unfolds in a panoramic landscape-like space, between a throng of squabbling doodles in the foreground and, courtesy of the wood panel’s grain, a distant sea’s lapping waves.

But misfires and incongruities made the exhibition feel rudderless. At 23 works, the checklist was overpopulated, with 10 7-by-5-inch, acrylic-and-marker exercises attesting to little but the artist’s facility. Several canvases depict rudimentary landscapes–cousins of First Date—that bridge “earth” and “sky” with “figures,” roughly speaking: amorphous entities that might be communicating via pantomime, boomerang, stink bomb or semaphore. The largest, worst, yet most memorable of these, Family Outing (48 by 96 inches), brings squawky commix artists like Tony Millionaire into the mix.

Now, stylistic inconsistency is not in itself a flaw, but derivativeness is. Fine marks time, equivocates and seems wholly committed to too few of these works. An exception – the ugly and difficult Family Outing – suggests that she pursue the so-bad-it’s-good approach. (It’s worked for Carroll Dunham.) Fine is at a crossroads, where any self-aware artist surely has tarried: play to one’s strengths, or take the plunge into the nasty unknown? Until she resolves this dilemma, she’ll dither.