David Rhodes reflects on a recent exhibition of paintings by Suzan Frecon at David Zwirner Gallery, New York. The exhibition catalogue, with an essay by David Cohen was recently published by the gallery.

Rhodes writes: "Throughout the exhibition, movement of the brush and bleeds of oil from one color to the next are far from hard-edge abstraction: each change at the boundaries or variation in opacity of the color crucially adjusts a painting’s reading." Later in the article he adds that "Frecon’s work materializes the ideas that generate it — ideas about color, surface, shape and scale — the desire is for painting itself to make a self-referential, visual narrative, that is evocative of, rather than representative of, experience in the world."