Yvonne Wells could have been a classic modern painter and a class act. Well, maybe just once, but a work from 1994 would be eye-catching even if it were not hanging right there over the front desk, at Fort Gansevoort through November 2.
Four rows of red squares run nearly nine feet across, set against black. Simplify, simplify, simplify, it says, not minimally but boldly. So what if each row broadens to include a mish-mash of colors and zebra patterns, and the black has a slim white border. These are her African American Squares.
Wells has a flair for stitching chaos together just long enough to keep it under control. An earlier work has an uncharacteristic lightness, with touches of color running here and there through a still lighter field. Never mind that it may yet unravel, for this is Untied Knots. Still, the two works introduce what may seem at first a welcome change for the gallery as well. It specializes in dense renderings of black and Caribbean culture, in fabric and paint, by such artists as Willie Birch, Shuvinai Ashoona, Myrlande Constant, and Dawn Williams Boyd. Eye-opening as they were, was it getting to be too much of the same?
Wells marks a turn to clarity and abstraction, or does she? She, too, uses “assorted fabrics.” as the gallery terms her medium. Tapestry and hangings serve as painting everywhere these days, so fine. Keep looking, though, and her patterns make a point of quilting, starting with the show’s earliest work, Round Quilt from 1987. She makes explicit her debt to African American craft with her latest as well, The Gee’s Bend Way. Her designs may run out of control even by that standard, too. She does, after all, have Crazy Quilt.
She weaves not just abstraction, but a way of life. That mad design includes a bare branch, a pumpkin smile, and a cross. A striped quilt holds, she says, a sprit face. Wells calls another fabric an apron. A woman’s work is never done, especially an artist’s. You can judge whether she is sincere about either one.
That sounds duly pious in the manner of much of art’s diversity. Maybe so, but another work has half a dozen Crown Royal labels—enough to get everyone drunk, whoever they be. The logo disturbs the regularity of jigsaw shapes in white while anchoring them in black. Once again, Wells is crazy but focused. Unnamed creatures enter here and there as well. When she calls one That’s Me, maybe it is.
The show does not run in anything like chronological order, but then Wells does not change all that much over time. While the choices become increasingly representational, she sticks to her guns. Still, she can seem to take the easy way out. Her abstraction does not sit still long enough to create a signature image, and representation does not settle firmly into a culture or a myth. Still, she bridges boundaries between both worlds, with a degree of skepticism about both. She also has those reds.
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