Francine Tint, Airlift 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 104 courtesy Upsilon Gallery.
Francine Tint: In Dialogue with Helen Frankenthaler
Upsilon Gallery : 23 E 67th St.
To November 30th
By DAVID JAGER October 30, 2024
For the last 50 odd years, Francine Tint has worked steadily on continuing the legacy of New York painterly abstraction. Forging her own iconoclastic path, Tint has taken the most salient elements of both action painting and colorfield and emerged with her own lively synthesis. After a long career, she is part of the generation of painters that form an unbroken lineage back to the golden age of New York abstraction.
This is probably the reasoning between the showing here with Frankenthaler, who was a member of the second generation of abstractionists that followed in the titanic wake of Pollock and De Kooning. Tint’s most recent work here is shown alongside three medium sized works of Frankenthaler on paper. Taken together it is an interesting contemporary snapshot of a painter who continues innovating in a vein that many would consider art historical. Tint remains a champion of abstraction, and she brings as much freshness and verve to her work as ever.
Even so, Tint is very much a painter of her generation. She shares its abiding concerns with depth, space, surface, gesture and freedom. The Hans Hoffman ‘push pull’- instilled in many of her painting contemporaries through his long teaching residence in Provincetown-is strongly present in each of her works. You can feel the drama of tension and release that comes from her deep engagement with both figure and ground. She also reflects her generations desire to surrender materials to chance, however gesturally she applies them. In this she is of a piece with Frankenthaler, surrendering her poured and splashed materials to the whims of gravity.
Above and beyond these common stylistic concerns, however, Tint distinguishes herself through an exceptional sense of depth and breadth, building on the ‘infinite’ plane of pictorial space Jackson Pollock so adeptly opened up- exploded really- in his drip paintings. Tint gives us a pictorial plane no longer bounded by representational or narrative conventions. The space behind them, by extension, is unleashed. We could be swimming in a microcosm, or adrift in interstellar space. A sense of immense freedom engulfs us when we stand in front of them.
This is especially evident in ‘Airlift’, perhaps the strongest painting in the show. Intimations of vastness seem to exhale between its spontaneous organic splashes. This is further amplified by her use of jewel toned and occasionally iridescent yellows, aquas and blues. The surface prettiness of her colors superficially engage the eye in a way that calls out with the deeper and more primordial ground by contrast, giving her blobs the sensation they are lifting (hence the title?)
Clement Greenberg, champion of Frankenthaler (and longtime friend and advisor to Tint), sternly discouraged viewers from interposing figurative or narrative content into abstract work. But he said nothing about organic form, especially as precursors to a landscape.
So I feel safe saying there is a chthonic ‘oomph’ to Tints shapes and splashes that belies figuration but still seems rooted in Nature. Nature at its most basic seems to be her organizing theme. Her abstractions borrow from the formal syntax of the natural world, especially its combination of the intentional and the improvisatory. Nature erupts, synthesizes, organizes, accretes, pools, splashes and drips, and these are the processes that Tint engages in her painting.
Francine Tint, Heartbeat, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 169 courtesy Upsilon Gallery
Take “Heartbeat”, for example, the other large scale work of the show. It extends the length of the main viewing room, nearly devouring it. Pourings and splashes of mauve, aqua, teal and light blue form the backdrop along the canvases horizontal length, but vigorous brushings and rolling of navy and dark brown add surface engagement over the top of them in a contrapuntal layering. The effect is also musical, and much has been said about the musical nature of Tint’s work (she also told me she always listens to Jazz continuously as she works).
These layers are then brought into focus by a single long drip of Goldenrod across the whole of it, a final element that nonetheless brings all of the layers into synchronization. With it the number of layers behind it become evident, and once again we are looking into a two dimensional surface that has created the illusion of immense depth and space. These skillful illusions are wrought not only by her compositional sense but her extraordinarily subtle sense of color.
Frankenthaler and Tint emerged from the muscular and gestural fracas of Abstract Expressionism championed by Pollock and De Kooning. Greenberg, who had championed the gestural Ab Ex school of the fifties, had been looking for artists who employed new methods of engaging the painterly surface in the sixties. It was then that stumbled across Frankenthaler’s poured paint on flat surfaces approach. By undercutting gesture in a radical way, she managed instead to emphasize the aleatoric nature of extensiveness.
Frankenthaler’s effect is therefore much more placid and meditative. As an innovator if not founder of the approach, Frankenthaler’s work tends to be cooler than Tint. In her three works included here you can see her love of meditative, nested forms, directing the paint onto the surface in ways that suggest the pooling and water.
Tint however, offers a distinct midway between the macho gestural of Pollock’s generation and Frankenthalers more subdued color field. As evidenced in all of the work in this show, she enjoys not only pouring but flinging and splashing, dramatic layering and engagement, adding gestural bravado that registers on the canvas as movement and strength. She is also not averse to dragging a brush across the canvases surface. With Tint there is, in addition to the original technique of thinned paints poured onto raw canvas, the addition of elements that bring rhythmic intensity and liveliness.
Taken individually, it’s hard to say if any of these techniques would cohere, but as a whole, it dances. Tint has offered us a rare and contemporary glimpse into the project of abstraction as it has matured into the 21st century. We are privileged to witness it. WM
