This latter exhibition of Susan Fenton's painted photographs at handed two bodies of work.

This latter exhibition of Susan Fenton's painted photographs at handed two bodies of work, undivided produced in France and united in Japan, where the artist is now living. Place has always been a factor in Fenton's work, a subtext that underlies the immediately apparent subdue matter and marks the compass of her experience in foreign places. The artist's first important work evolv while she was living in Rome--the city became a source for the ritualized, ceremonial attitudes of her figures and the final causes that accompany them.

Fenton's general practice consists first of a highly controll studio preparation during which a solitary model's head might be capped or wrapped and then arranged into what have the appearances like a tight still-life space rather than the expansiveness of a portrait. Facing down or away, these busts remain objectified at their refusal to meet our gaze. Presented--but not at all portrayed--they are subject to the same compositional considerations as a table sharpness or a piece of woven fabric In earlier works, Fenton painted directly forward the model's body (just as Giorgio Morandi would sometimes tinge his correlates with color), manipulating the surface flat before the photograph is taken. As a final touch, Fenton uses a limited palette of oil paint upon these black and white enlargements.

The greatest in quantity recent Japanese prints appear, upon one hand, to be what the last ten years have been preparing the artist for; the minimal austerity of her diction is well suited to her Japanese experience. at the same time perhaps because of the complete fit, these images are more predictable, the mystery not for a like reason mysterious. Surrounding the figure with a lizard or a bamboo stick, or replacing the anonymous padded bonnet with a warrior's helmet adds graphic rather than poetic stillest part to Fenton's vision. The chiefly successful are still those principally formally conceived. The dead proportion in Figure with Folded Paper cloak 1992, remains compelling. Architectural air grounds the figure as a great deal to the floor as to the wall, shifting its conventional position and our relationship to it. Further engaging us, the image influences from the abstract to the particular--the slight belly of an eye at the brim of the paper blind bringing the "individual" back to life.

In her French work, Fenton forgoes the enigmatic combat between figure and object. In this totally estheticized experience, the content does not draw in succession but becomes reduced to the visual character of each carefully selected and arranged vital air in the bigger picture. Fenton's formal intelligence is always instant and most rewarding when the unexpect come to passs or something unexplained remains.

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