Connie Fox: A Different Sense of Complexity

By Barry Schwabsky

My first comment to Connie Fox as I was seeing for the first time the paintings she’d been making since I decamped to London five years ago was that I thought the paintings had clarified themselves—that she’d distilled her work, obviating the need for some of the complexity I recalled from her work of the 90’s.

Connie disagreed. "I think there are just as many elements in them as there used to be," she told me. "They’re still complex, but they have a different sense of complexity." Of course she’s right, as I came to realize on spending more time with the paintings, and yet I’m still willing to say that while Connie has not made things any easier on herself as the maker of the work, she’s made things at least a little easier on her viewers. The pleasures offered by her new paintings are, if anything, deeper than before, yet they’re also more evident on the surface.

Maybe that’s because of the way she uses the grid—something that had not been an important element in her work before. At least since the 60’s, it’s been something of an anchor for abstract painting; by now some viewers may feel that there’s nothing fresh left to be done with the grid, but they should look at these paintings. Unlike many practitioners, Connie doesn’t use the grid to solve or eliminate her compositional problems—she uses it to generate them. That’s why her grids rarely adhere to the picture plane or run parallel to the edges of the painting’s rectangle—instead, they’re ever so slightly askew, and that’s just enough to open up endless spatial possibilities undreamt-of by the formalism that was so prevalent in the 60’s.

Much of Connie’s inspiration comes from literature yet illustration seems not to tempt her. The title of one recent painting, "The Coolness of Sunshine," evokes the lyricism of Pablo Neruda but does not send us searching through the Chilean’s voluminous work to find the poem the words come from; instead, it invites us to dwell in the oxymoronic spirit the phrase proposes, this complicated equipoise of contradictory qualities. Is the painting bright or dark? I can’t say. And then it contains so many different whites, but one black conjures the atmosphere that transforms all those whites into white despite the fact that white and black, for once, don’t seem opposed in this painting.

Pulling off a painting like that is what I call mastery. There’s a feeling for how to work with the materials that implies long experience. Edward Said, in his last, posthumously published book, distinguished two sorts of "late styles" in the arts, either a breakthrough into serenity and resolution as in the Shakespeare of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, or else the intransigence and rupture of Beethoven’s late quartets. I find it remarkable that going into her eighth decade—and no, she doesn’t look it—Connie is blithely pushing forward as if late styles were never going to be an issue, but sure of painting just getting more interesting the longer you work at it.