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Jay DeFeo Nielsen, Boston ARTnews, January 2008 By JOANNE SILVER The Rose (1958-66), an 11-by-8-foot, one-ton behemoth, claimed eight years of Jay Defeo's life and exercised extraordinary power over her career. The picture assured the San Francisco painter's reputation more than four decades ago but has also eclipsed much of the rest of her output. This result is regrettable because many of her drawings, modest-size paintings, photographs, and collages are marked by a surprising grace, wit, and restraint. Recurring motifs ranged from tripods and spidery biomorphic shapes to bold peaks jumping into space. The black object hovering in the charcoal-and-acrylic drawings titled Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1989) reflects a mysticism compatible with the views of DeFeo's Beat Generation friends. In Samurai No. 11 (1987), slasing arcs of tempera, pastel, and charcoal consolidate gestures into an orb poised like a planet against a midnight ground. Both the mundane and the mystical served as inspiration for the artist, who playfully juxtaposed them in such pieces as the untitled 1973 black-and-white photograph of a stilled electric fan in front of a leafy landscape - on the brink, perhaps, of sending a breeze through the trees.
Even at her most representative, DeFeo courted abstraction; conversely, her abstractions always hint at elements of the visible world. Triangles call to mind weighty mountains or crisp fortune cookies. Tripods flicker with glimpses of the human figure. This show revealed an artist delighted with nuance and mutability, restlessly searching for their visual equivalents.
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