The New York Sun

Friedman would be the last person to take on the airs of a higher power, but any artist worth her mettle knows that the challenge of creativity is to yoke life from materials that are, at their base, absent of it.

“My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms,” the Roman poet Ovid wrote in Book One of “Metamorphoses.” Picking up that gestational ball, the painter Barbara Friedman has chosen the title “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” for a recently opened show of canvases at Frosch & Co. It’s a direct quotation from Ovid describing the beginning of all things as “nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion/Discordant atoms warred.”

The poet goes on to tell of how a “kindlier nature” brought order to chaos, “so things evolved, and out of blind confusion/Found each its place.” Ms. Friedman would be the last person to take on the airs of a higher power, but any artist worth her mettle knows that the challenge of creativity is to yoke life from materials that are, at their base, absent of it. That is the inherent paradox of art and its reason for being.

The paintings Ms. Friedman has been exhibiting over the past few years — a 2023 show at the Crown Heights outpost, Five Myles, was particularly memorable — can be likened to the musings of another historical figure, Leonardo Da Vinci. In his notebooks, the prototypical Renaissance man writes about “stains on the wall,” of how “you can see there resemblances to … an infinite number of things.” Leonardo knew that humankind is forever on the hunt for recognizable forms.

Which isn’t to say that anything resembling “La Gioconda” (circa 1503) is on display at the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just that Ms. Friedman is working in a methodology whose roots are deep. As such, the pictures also have a foundation in the 20th century, particularly automatism — that is to say, channeling the unconscious through unpremeditated means — and the expansive sonorities of pigment typical of Color Field painting. You remember: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like.

Ms. Friedman’s canvases may initially strike viewers as a contemporary variant of Color Field painting, what with their luminous runs of often psychedelic color. On these terms alone, the paintings are fetching. The free-ranging nature of thinned paint — sometimes diluted to a fine grit; at other times, densely opalescent — are arrived at by the pouring of color on a canvas that’s been placed on the floor. The resulting eddies of form extend laterally rather than down; as a result, gravity is suspended.

First impressions are deceiving, and this is where Leonardo’s reference to “resemblances” begins to coalesce. If each canvas is a maelstrom of painterly incident it is also a springboard for, in Ms. Friedman’s telling of it, the “pollution” of images. Although one could spot allusions to the human form in the pictures, the compositions are typically punctuated with fauna or parts of their physiognomy: a snout, a claw, a beak, or feathers. Eyes, too, are a recurring and, at moments, unnerving motif.

Should all this sound like some kind of Surrealist parlor game, well, it is. But that doesn’t account for the oddball strain of poetry at its core, a quality that owes much to Ms. Friedman’s concision of means and deftness of touch. At their best — in canvases such as “Ovation,” “Nuzzle,” and the Bonnardesque “Friend” (all paintings are from 2024) — the pictures are augmented in a manner that confirms, rather than puts a stop on, their spontaneity. Ms. Friedman knows when just enough is just right.

Did I mention that Ms. Friedman’s paintings are kind of funny? If chance incident powers the imagery then eccentricity defines them. Discrepancies of scale, anatomy, and juxtaposition — witness the ethereal benevolence vested in “Nestled Head” or the monumental  snout coming toward us from the other side of the veil in “Golliwog” — make for abrupt and bracing flights of wit and fancy, of occasions and personages as yet unimagined. Ovid would likely approve, as should gallery-goers visiting “All Rude and Lumpy Matter.