Lawrence Markey Inc.

Suzan Frecon recent painting

at Lawrence Markey
San Antonio, TX

January 17–February 23, 2007

Lawrence Markey is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of recent paintings and watercolors by Suzan Frecon.

This will be Frecon’s eighth one-person exhibition at Lawrence Markey, and the first in San Antonio.

Suzan Frecon was born in Pennsylvania and studied art at Penn State University from 1959 to 1963. She attended the Université de Strasbourg in 1962, and the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1963 to 1966. Suzan Frecon has lived and worked in New York since the late 1970's.

The exhibition will feature Frecon's most recent oil paintings, most of which are oil on wood panel, and watercolors.

In a conversation with John Yau, published in the Brooklyn Rail in October, 2005, Frecon spoke of her work (excerpted):

It’s both intuitive and mathematical. I don’t go by just the mathematics because if I don’t like it visually then I keep working. But if I’m getting somewhere that works visually based on the mathematical, then I go with it. But you know, I don’t talk about those things. I just want the viewer to experience the painting.

Oh, I think nature is a given. It’s impossible to say we aren’t from nature. I can never explain how important it is to art. One way is the experience of looking, walking in the woods, looking at a sunset, is comparable to the experience of looking at art or listening to music. It’s just so much a part of the soul of humanity. When you are looking at the Cézanne for example, or a Pomo basket, you just feel strongly about this captured feeling. I would love it if I could aspire to capture something comparable in my paintings.

I always craved geometric solutions. They underlie so many things; architecture and old paintings that are informed by geometry, like Cimabue, Romanesque cathedrals, churches. You have the structure of the building and then you have the curves of the architecture and then within that you have the painting and within that you have the art. I like that, and Pomo baskets and Nigerian indigo cloth with light coming through. All those things left their powerful impression on me. I think those things have the influence of geometry.

I think the truth of a painting is the paint itself. All the explanations can’t change what that truth is.