ArtSeen
Suzan Batu
JEFFERY COPLOFF GALLERY | MAY 4 - JUNE 2, 2001
In the current exhibit, Suzan Batu presents paintings reduced to complementary pairs of colors such as a cool blue and hot pink, and even benign battleship gray and dull orange create an unexpected thrill. Soft edges and seductive surfaces render Batu’s works’ pulsating tones almost palpable. Each painting is its own self-contained world, and at once denies entrance and intimates proliferation.
An exclusive vocabulary of stylized floral and calligraphic figures on a static ground recall Batu’s Turkish roots. The images would not lie still on a carpet or conform to a vessel but seem to want to get up and dance. The flatness and symbolism of Eastern tradition yields to the Western notion of the painting as a kind of abstract arena. While intimations of natural forms, such as continents adrift or aquatic animals, the laconic Brownian movement breaks in a frisson in the larger square canvases. The figures whip around like scythes or jellyfish tendrils, sometimes stopping to spread embarrassingly into bulbous protrusions, sometimes coming to rest as polite dots. The arbitrary shapes could just as easily be the patterns of camouflage as warm, saline spawning grounds. The only thing that can be relied on here is the edges of the paintings against the white walls.
It is also important to note what is excluded from these abstractions. There is no place for a grid or any other kind of spine or structure here, except in an idiosynchratic order in a wholly imaginary construct. The scenes, with their psychedelic ambivalence and splendor, have roots in the art curlicues of Aubrey Beardsley and even in Edvard Munch’s chilly Fertility, whose initial promise of luscious vermilion berries gives way to a sinister claustrophobia
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Roots/Anchors
By Lilly WeiDEC 21-JAN 22 | ArtSeen
The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center is part of a vast, venerable, and somewhat unruly complex on the northeast shore of Staten Island. Melissa West, the director of the Newhouse, zoomed in on the sites history to curate Roots/Anchors, an engrossing, multi-layered exhibition currently on view there.

Jarrett Key: from the ground, up
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightAPRIL 2022 | ArtSeen
Jarrett Key is interested in the slow, germinating speed of folklore and the gradual repetition needed for world-building.
No COLA, No Contract:
On the Ground at the UC Strike
By Zach Hicks and Rebecca Gross
DEC 22–JAN 23 | Field Notes
On November 14, following the largest Strike Authorization Vote in the history of higher-education unionism, some 48,000 academic workers across the University of California system went out on strike.
Enrique Chagoya: Borderless
By Hearne PardeeMAY 2023 | ArtSeen
Enrique Chagoya applies subversive wit to intimately crafted revisions of Aztec codicescartoon-like, fold-out books made on panels of traditional Amate paper. His vocabulary of politicized, graphic imagery also extends into his large paintings on Amate panels, mounted on canvas, of which four are included in Borderless, his new show at George Adams Gallery.