The Brooklyn Rail

Jane Swavely’s new paintings at Magenta Plains are electric. They engage the optical and bodily senses in a sharp, but pleasant, way with acidic hues and metallic washes that catch and reflect the light. They are hung low, but this enhances their effect, letting them stand out as objects in a walkable space. In the diptych Strawberry Fields (2026) (the painting which lends the exhibition its title), the scale and format of the canvases implicate the human body—in this case two bodies, wryly invoking Swavely’s fascination with doubles, doubling, and twins.

The installation is a testament to the art of paring things down to essentials: light, color, gesture, form, matter. This is a quality that Swavely also manifests in her work. A single large work anchors three of the gallery’s four walls, and on the last, a pink and turquoise canvas is paired with two pastel drawings. The intimacy of the latter medium and Swavely’s use of soft pastel tones contrasts with the paintings, which are more exuberant in palette and scale. The laid, toothy texture of the drawings’ Bugra paper is also perfect for capturing the delicate, powdery grains of the handmade soft pastel the artist is fond of using.

The smaller painting that greets visitors at the gallery’s entrance is airy and hot, with bright yellow seeming to lift a descending cloud of red, tussling a bit in the process. As we can observe in this work, passages of different colors often wrap around the edges of Swavely’s paintings and drawings, reminding us of the natural border of her chosen format, which is usually vertical in orientation.

Like the artist herself, the paintings and drawings here are straightforward and intuitive, betraying no sleight of hand or eye. What you see is what you get, but there is a lot to look at in these works. This isn’t exactly beautiful painting, but it is incandescent, like the swirling red inferno of Not Yet Titled (2026), which perhaps steals the show. This is not static painting either, as it encapsulates the dynamic urban energy of the Bowery home and studio where Swavely has lived and worked for over four decades.

Swavely’s paintings have been characterized as atmospheric and lyrical, partaking of the legacy of postwar abstract painters like Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jules Olitski. In the 1980s, Swavely worked for artists Lois Lane and Brice Marden, and while the influence of these figures is recognizable as well, it is hardly overdetermined. Swavely’s work resists easy categorization, just as she resists any tendency to overly interpret her work. In the past few years she has refined her method while simultaneously breaking loose from the limitations of the picture plane, a challenge with which Marden also grappled as he sought to unite surface, picture, and materials—an aspiration encapsulated by his famous expression, “the plane image.”

By contrast, Swavely leans into her paintings, which are set up horizontally on the floor as she works on them, alternately brushing paint and wiping it away, a process that allows for accident—chance—and for the pooling and mixing of colors. The impressions from the stretcher index that moment of pressure between the painted canvas and the bar underneath. In Not Yet Titled (2026) these impressions form a cross, which emerges from behind the canvas like a ghost of the Minimalist grid. Smudged handprints are visible in the lower right, recording the literal hand of the artist as she moves paint across the surface. These traces of material process are essential to Swavely’s work, as they are palpable records of her living, moving, and feeling.

Swavely’s natural sensibility lends itself toward abstraction but not as a style or a historical categorization. In a way, her abstraction aligns better with a literal etymological understanding of the word: the process of drawing away. This is how she manages to pull utterly moving works of art from nonexistence, from a simple confluence of materials and processes. The emphasis on sensations over concepts affords her a great degree of openness, in both the making of the works and their interpretation. Swavely encourages us to look, and through looking, to better understand ourselves and the world. As the first two lines of the famous song go, “Living is easy with eyes closed. Misunderstanding all you see.”