Chuck Twardy Staff writer  

Painters' huesfulness

The News & Observer

June 11, 1993

Gomez, who keeps a studio in Raleigh's Artspace, appeals to a more contemporary tradition of color composition. For good reason she titles one of her pastel landscapes "Pullen Park on a Fauve Afternoon." Like Matisse or Derain, she flattens space and wields rich color to evoke rather than represent, the park scene. She also uses color to shape and shade.

Although she collapses dimension onto the picture plane, she does not ignore it. Darker tones indicate shadows among the trees in the Pullen Park work. "Light in the Park," also a pastel, indicates its subject by means of a pale peach passage (foreground) and a region of light lime and moss greens shot through the trees.But Gomez is up to much more. A former animator, she is interested in 3-D motion effects in static, two-dimensional compositions. This speaks to her seemingly aggressive mark-making and to her strategy of creating dynamic tensions among passages, both through the shape and direction of marks and by thejuxtaposition of colors. She cleverly suggests the waving in the wind of the "Cherry Trees at Duke Gardens," also a pastel.In this work, too, the grain of individual tones is finer, denser than in the other pastels, which tend toward discrete marks and shapes of solid color, like a paint-by-number exercise gone wild.By contrast, her watercolors are exercises in the subtle shifting of tones and their levels of translucence.The watercolor "Putting on Her Daily Face, You Push, I'll Pull" is busily layered with information. A woman does her makeup while a man watches behind her in a bathroom. A whiskey bottle is among the containers around the sink. Reflective surfaces capture different images of the woman from different moments, and the collapsed space includes unlikely features, such as her foot at the lower edge. These treatments, too, recall the animator, now cramming into one flat image what many images f rom varied angles would tell in a film.This past, not surprisingly, is hinted at in "Self-Portrait," a large pastel. Over a mantel hangs a picture of a bird taking flight in a Muybridge-like sequence. Also, the figure seems to be moving, or just about to, thanks to the vigorous saw-toothing that shapes the hair and the lower body.

Gomez is just as adept at narrative as she is at landscape composition.

ANDREA GOMEZ

"Interior Landscapes"

Through June 26,