Body Work: Recent Paintings
Carol Miller Frost
October 5 – November 21, 2010

In front of me is a seemingly vast field of nondescript, atmospheric color divided vertically—sometimes into halves, but also into thirds or quarters, and always roughly, not by objective measure, but most certainly by eyeOne band will gently relinquish its border to another as it doubles or triples or quadruples. In one of these locales, an ovoid gathering of searching contour lines circumnavigates to generate a presence that uncannily pre-figures, in some primal way, my own body, standing to address the painting. This bodily presence in the painting is at once secure in its placement and then vulnerable in its uneasy disposition. With this veritable and necessary tension, there is no easy balance, no final resolution, but only the inevitable dilemma of my own uneasiness, my own vulnerability. Here is a painting by Carol Miller Frost.

This ability of Frost to elicit empathy through her work is the hallmark of a humanistic studio practice that characterizes her work, as well as that of many from her generation. We found ourselves in the latter part of the 20th century suspended between the energized subjectivity of Abstract Expressionist painting and the cool, reductive mandates of Minimalism. How to find one’s way in this seeming contradiction ofexpressive opposites had been the overriding critical question behind our work, and it has continued to be for Frost’s paintings and drawings for more than twenty years. On the one hand, she admires the expressive conciseness of Barnett Newman’s “Zips,” which, in their reductive simplicity, are loaded with emotive presence. She is keenly tuned into the embodiment implicit in his work, regarding it as a bridge to her own concerns. In the Minimalist work of Donald Judd, another artist whose work she has studied, Frost looks beyond the strict, measured structures of his “specific objects” to the near transcendent experience she has in the presence of his work. From this dialogue with these two major movements in American Art she has forged a personal vision for a kind of painting that speaks eloquently at the nexus of seemingly antithetical positions. How can a form, Frost postulates, be simultaneously expressive and reductive?

Frost’s penchant for muted color, for tertiary and grayed down hues characterizes much of her oeuvre. It functions both as a pretext for the drawing and as an immutable expressive agent. This color is difficult to name or to place, and it seems to emanate from black, the proverbial absence of color, of light. This liminal state in which the color emerges out of blackness is for Frost a life-affirming condition through which the spirit of the body, rather than its mere corporeality, is expressed to the fullest, These subdued colors, then, are alive and warm, felt rather than deduced, intimate and receptive, vulnerable, and open to the exhilaration of uncertainty.

Frost’s penchant for muted color, for tertiary and grayed down hues characterizes much of her oeuvre. It functions both as a pretext for the drawing and as an immutable expressive agent. This color is difficult to name or to place, and it seems to emanate from black, the proverbial absence of color, of light. This luminal state in which the color emerges out of blackness is for Frost a life-affirming condition through which the spirit of the body, rather than its mere corporeality, is expressed to the fullest, These subdued colors, then, are alive and warm, felt rather than deduced, intimate and receptive, vulnerable, and open to the exhilaration of uncertainty.