Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Evelyn Statsinger
American; 20th-century
Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum
59%
Toward the Distant Present. Oil on canvas. 1975
Miyoko Ito plus Roger Brown, and sprinkle in some Nutt or Nilsson. I start off with Chicago-artist arithmetic because this painting, though a treat, looks derivative; it indicates that there's some reason for Statsinger's place on the Imagist movement's B-List. The graded colors are Ito's all the way, and seeing them deployed like this — contained, subsidiary to other forms, demarcated, distinguishable — clarifies what it is that makes the gradients work so well in Ito's paintings: her colors and how they blend are irreducible to, or just on the outskirts of, the overall structure of her paintings. But there's a boundedness to this piece of Statsinger's that tamps down her hues (even if it does so, paradoxically, by strengthening them) — color is instrumental in this painting. And that's just the thing: in the best 60s/70s Chicago work, it always seems at first like the "point" is the seediness or the horniness or the representational oddity, but really it's just the vehicle for indelible linework (Nutt, Rossi) or tough-to-justify color combinations (Ito, Paschke) or stark structural reductions (Ramberg). Imagist images are actually an abyss — this painting is far too fully about its organs and embedded frames. (2025)