"THE LANGUAGE OF PATTERNS," a five-woman exhibition at Pazo Fine Art's D.C. location, explores the dynamic intersection of repetition and form. Spanning from 1974 to 2022, these post-minimalist paintings, drawings, and mixed-media pieces use repeated gestures to activate and fully inhabit their rectangular formats.
Marilyn Lerner's single entry, from 1988, is striking but atypical. Its hard-edged multi-color bars, interlocking to mimic a maze, frame white channels and draw the eye toward the composition's center. More characteristic are Alison Hall and Andrea Way's all-over drawings, which drench the space with dots, dashes, stars, or numbers. Hall's eight "Hymns," made in 2022, punctuate black-on-black designs with silver-gray graphite dots and barely-there hints of blue and red. Among the tactics of Way's 1983-85 pictures are to link tiny white dots with thin black lines and to slice black diagonals across fields of tiny pink numbers. (Way is based in D.C.; the other four contributors live or lived in New York City.)
Gloria Klein's approach is similar, but bolder and more kinetic. The artist (1936-2021) arrays short, slanted bars of bright, contrasting hues that suggest pulses of light or energy. Her epic "Ten Panels" employs several colors but is dominated by red slashes, which dance across 10 squares whose backdrops are usually black or various shades of gray. While the elements suggest pixels, the piece was made in 1979, in the early days of the PC. The dashes that comprise her intricate paintings smack of all sorts of things in motion, from atoms to jangling musical notes.
The sole sculpture is Jackie Ferrara's six-foot-high wooden construction, which resembles a chimney. Like many of the show's other entries, the 1984 piece is made of rectangular bars, but these are 3D ones in natural wood hues. The effect is to build a cohesive entity while emphasizing the individual parts. The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, but that doesn't mean it's lesser. In "The Language of Patterns," the dialogue between constituent and totality is never-ending.