Gallery & Studio
Published Oct 2004
Cornelia MacFadyen’s Compelling Dualities

While Cornelia MacFadyen has roots in Abstract Expressionism, she also has a mystical bent. Which is to say, the paintings MacFadyen showed recently at Agora Gallery’s Chelsea venue, 530 West 25th Street, were as fascinating for their mysterious allusiveness as for their bold approach to form and color.
The painting called “M2”, for example, could be appreciated for its vibrant hues as well as its vigorous brush work. But it also conveyed a profoundly spiritual mood with its masklike faces emerging from the color areas like phantoms inhabiting a rainbow.
MacFadyen imbues even her most abstract forms with multiple meanings. In “The Hands,” for example, the gracefully overlapping textural strokes, created with oils and spackle on canvas, could also resemble luminous golden wings fluttering against deep blue nocturnal expanse. By avoiding making her images too literally descriptive, yet imbuing them with considerable suggestiveness nonetheless, MacFadyen manages to create abstract compositions with a great degree of allusiveness.
Another oil called “The Mountain” is also intriguingly ambiguous, for it can immediately be seen as exactly what its title implies: a reddish mountain range sandwiched between areas of red and green, signifying land and sky. At first glance, one might liken it to the earthy, hot hued landscapes of Marsden Hartley. But then it also has qualities akin to the ruddy nudes of Modigliani, when one suddenly realizes that the image is twofold: not only landscape but a reclining nude—the embodiment of a mythic Earth Mother. The active surface, with it rugged, textured stokes, also has tactile qualities in common with the more recent figurative paintings of the former Abstract Expressionist Milton Resnick. However, only Cornelia MacFadyen seems capable of imparting so many simultaneous meanings to such a boldly simplified composition. She does so by virtue of her energetic paint handling, as well as her unique talent for making forms suggest more than one thing at the same time.
Some of MacFadyen’s most dynamic compositions center on circular forms which a decidedly sensual, feminine quality. Some of these are nonspecific, such as “Entry” a painting in oil and spackle on canvas in which both the rounded contours of the shapes and membranous surface suggest something of the birthing process. Another work in oil and mixed media called “Identity Swirl,” with its luminous reds and pinks set against a deep blue ground and its bold central form seeming to ascend, also convey a sense of something coming mysteriously into being. MacFadyen’s use of colors possessed of great chromatic subtlety that imbue her forms with a seemingly contradictory sense of the solid and ethereal enhances the quality of pregnancy, of hovering possibility, in many of her paintings.
By contrast, she comes back down to earth in canvases such as “Waiting” a monumental female nude, or “Solitude,” a brooding blue figure in a mysterious setting that may be a night forest, demonstrating the diverse yet harmonizing qualities that make Cornelia MacFadyen a singularly evocative painter.
--Stuart Leslie Myers
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