Fran O'Neill

Review of Fran O'Neill's solo exhibition, Left Turn, featured in Two Coats of Paint

Salon Zürcher, a small fair organized by and held at Zürcher Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village, presents itself as an intimate alternative to large-scale, superstore-style art fairs. Inspired by artistic salons, it offers its visitors the opportunity to mingle among the artists and engage in direct discussions with them. For its 25th edition, the fair will present the fourth edition of a group show of 11 women artists titled Women of Spirit. The exhibition takes its title from the 18th-century French term “femmes d’esprit,” referring to independently-minded female painters, writers, and intellectuals who were routinely overlooked by the male-dominated art scene of their time. Hailing mostly from the United States and France, the 11 participating artists are Rosaire Appel, Jeri Coppola, Brigitte Engler, Laurel Marx, Donna Moylan, Fran O’Neill, Janet Passeh, Marcy Rosenblat, Fran Shalom, Jackie Shatz, and Rebecca Smith.

"First, it’s the capture of light that draws your attention, refracted across the canvas like rippled water in a creek. Then it’s the way colour and movement wrestle in undulating lines, dragging and splitting pigment into huge writhing forms. Physical and full of life, Fran O’Neill’s paintings captivate from the minute you walk in the gallery door."

"Maybe it helps to know that Fran O’Neill has a deep past in figurative painting rooted in perception and drawing from life: that would make sense of the compositional acuity, vivacious economy and voluptuous sense of bodily connection in her beefy, boisterous forms. It might also explain why they sometimes recall Howard Hodgkin though they are far less polite in dispatch. Or why the brushstrokes remind us of Juan Uslé but with more generational purpose. But the highest compliment one can pay to these audacious paintings is that the artist’s formal groundings aren’t beaten into them. They are abstract, hard and fast."

"For artist Fran O’Neill, her art is about subtraction, the act of wiping things away on the canvas with her arms as the brush. Looking at it, I felt as though I was viewing some next-level sophisticated, large-scale finger painting, with each abstraction touching on a series of different feelings and impressions almost unreachable. All of the artists in this show seem to have an innate understanding of layering and translucency, but hers is unique in the active process of taking away layers more often. The other artists in this show most actively layer one thing atop another—O’Neill’s tendency is to layer and strip away, perhaps layering again, which makes for some very intriguing canvases. She says that she works by going into her zone, starting with, she says, “Coffee and brain work.” The best work happens for her when she’s given up on a piece, because that’s when she starts taking the risks which pay off for her artistically. Those bits that are just on the edge of perception, color just peeking through behind a layer, are her “ghosts of memory,” a colorful shadow of what came before, which you can only see through her reduction of layers."

"Saccoccio creates “improvisational portraits” which consist of countless layers of oil, mica and varnish. Fran O’Neill uses as many as 50 layers of paint in her work. Hayuk allows her paint to drip down the canvas. Nathanson uses an involved process involving polymers to create her color field paintings. Ferris uses a spray gun in her work. Weyer is the most traditional abstract expressionist in the exhibit."

Video studio visit 

"For her big strokes, O’Neill uses nothing more than herself to push oils across canvas. It’s a uniquely physical process, one sized to the canvas and her own frame, and results in something I now see, in part, as a set of movements captured in one long exposure. This is not at all to suggest her work is merely the result of some actionist happening. Her paintings are nothing like Yves Klein’s raunchy “human paintbrush” performances, which would today certainly land him in the court of microaggressions.

"Fran O’Neill’s fine show at the Studio School demonstrates how the practice of gestural abstraction can remain very much alive in the hands of someone willing to explore and experiment. While Louise Fishman’s accomplished, historically aware exhibition at Cheim & Read shows us a mature artist committed to the lexicon of the New York School, in O’Neill’s paintings we see the pursuit of an originality that really pushes forward the vocabulary of abstract art. Her backwards glance toward the legacy of mid-20th century painting is transformed into a forward leap into the unknown—in the sense that the paintings do not appear to refer to actual things and that the artist is genuinely trying out a language of her own. Building a new vernacular in abstract art is a trying task, especially if the artist knows the history of the genre. In O’Neill there is both a sense of the past and an independence from that past."

"Fran O’Neill, subject of her second solo show at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, was a recent recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant.  Her latest series is a breakthrough: these sumptuous, all-over abstractions built of mind-bogglingly intricate details are oceanic in their fusion of decorative and labor intensity.  Like the ocean, there is slow evolution and constant undulation.  The little teeth-like tessarae in Reel are negative shapes, revealing the white ground of the canvas exposed from the painstakingly filled-in spaces between.  The impact is somewhere between the aboriginal painting of O’Neill’s native Australia and Gustav Klimt.  Mitchell, one feels, would have approved."