The Brooklyn Rail

The title of Francine Tint’s current show, Symbolic of the Whole, could refer to the overarching ambitions of Abstract Expressionism, which Tint extends through her bodily engagement with color. The show, which inaugurates 68 Prince Street’s spacious new gallery in Kingston, offers a sample of Tint’s five decades of painting, focusing on work from the past two years. Despite variations in format and composition, they provide a sense of the “whole” of her efforts by maintaining a consistently high level of painterly conviction, repeatedly affirming through gestural process her faith in the revelatory potential of colors and in the eventual coming together of her impulsive, intuitive marks. Tint presses the limits of her efforts at inclusion, her embrace of “the whole,” by adding three early figurative sculptures to her exhibition. These studies from life, two in bronze and one in wax, emphasize her commitment to bodily engagement on a modest scale. The intimate, tactile working of their surfaces, which echoes the rich visual surfaces of her canvases, attests to the layers of experience and gestural memory that underlie the poured paintings.

Publicity images show Tint in a shower cap and paint-stained hazmat suit, pouring buckets of color onto a canvas on her studio wall—a process apparently used in several works in the current show, like Untime Connection (2024), which harks back to her early drawings of dancers. Lightly veiled in pigment, it recalls both Henri Matisse’s Barnes Foundation murals and Auguste Rodin’s drawings of Cambodian dancers. Like Matisse, Tint endows her colors with a full expression of mass and weight (embracing three-dimensional form, Matisse even claimed to paint what lay behind him). In a stunning early painting from 2018, Homage to Hofmann, Tint acknowledges another influence, Hans Hofmann, who also generated spatial abstractions from the model and envisioned colors in three dimensions. Layering patches of soft, dense green over fields of intense red and underlying yellow, Tint suggests, like Hofmann, an internalized architecture anchored to the framing rectangle.

The gestural immediacy of Tint’s colors and their engagement with the preconscious mind intrigued critic Clement Greenberg, who visited her studio regularly in the 1980s. Describing his studio visits in an interview with David Ebony, Tint notes that Greenberg liked to be “surprised,” turning his back as she brought out a painting and then turning around to take in a first impression of the work, a pre-rational apprehension of “the whole.” Greenberg wrote perceptively about such overall, immersive effects when he linked Monet’s late “Water Lilies” to the American avant-garde, and in his appreciation of poured colors in the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Tint’s Emerald Green, a striking work from 2019, recalls both the “push-pull” of Hofmann’s colored rectangles on gestural grounds and Ellsworth Kelly’s monochromatic Tableau vert (1952), an early Color Field painting he made in response to visiting Giverny, inspired by the submerged vegetation of Monet’s “Nymphéas.”

Tint’s most recent works, which she refers to as “Open Paintings,” make more deliberate use of raw canvas to explore new spatial relationships. In the light-infused central square of Untime Connection, sharp and softened edges of abstracted figures generate a choreographic interplay, while the radical cropping of City of Glass (2025)—her most minimal painting—exploits the contrast between frayed and blended edges within its gestural splash. Magnetism (2025) creates a quite different, cubistic architecture, with a knife-like border of dark green cutting into the white background. More in the realm of landscape, Kelp Garden (2024) deploys a sloping foreground and suggestions of atmospheric perspective, while Island of Whispers (2024) cuts off the foreground entirely and brings us into direct confrontation with its spills, using the white “sky” as a foil. When David Ebony questioned Tint about a possible change of direction with the wash-like, atmospheric colors of these later works, she responded by emphasizing her long experience with pouring paint, suggesting a process of ripening rather than evaporation. Indeed, other late works like Wild Fireworks (2025) and Against the Light (2024) establish deeply saturated, resonant surfaces, within which explosive fusions of yellow and violet suggest nuclear cloud chambers.

Seas on Earth (2024), which merges indigo and rose, evokes Hofmann with its submerged geometry, and bears a submerged painting on its verso, with layered orange and green, unfortunately not visible in the show. Tint moves here into the territory of painter Dona Nelson, whose own two-sided abstractions, equally unrestrained, are engineered as free-standing objects; rather than pursue this opening into three dimensions, however, Tint allows her hidden painting to smolder in obscurity. Against the Light’s risky fusion of spectral extremes, with warning flickers of red and a transgressive drip of dark violet at its center, establishes an oppositional stance that suggests no restraint on her uninhibited color improvisations or her refreshingly unselfconscious performative practice.