Rochelle Feinstein S'Wonderful, 1994 Rochelle Feinstein Wonderful View, 1995 Rochelle Feinstein A Wonderful Place to Live, 1994, Cicely Cottingham True Blue (Rent), 1995 Denise Mullen Manos de Piedra Denise Mullen Manos de Piedra

rochelle feinstein, cicely cottingham and denise mullen at the jersey city museum by John Mendelsohn Of the three solo shows running concurrently at the Jersey City Museum, Rochelle Feinstein's extends the furthest, both in time and in ambition. "The Wonderfuls" are 15 distinctly different paintings from the past six years that share a common format, a 33-inch square, and a common structure, the grid. The word "wonderful" appears in each title, beginning with the first painting, It's a Wonderful Life. Here a scumbled matrix of red and green allows only a vestige of quilted order to remain in the welter of streaked paint. Its mordant humor and critique of holiday propaganda sets the tone for the whole series to come. These are paintings that want it all: to simultaneously function as abstraction and representation, social commentary and sensate experience. Their ability to compromise these categories makes painting a kind of public speech, endowed with the capacity to challenge, slyly or forthrightly, the rhetoric of cultural images. That rhetoric is embodied in the titles, ranging from Mr. Wonderful (a Stella labyrinth of washy rainbow colors), to Having a Wonderful Time (a skittering Klee-like "city" of wiry black lines on a field of white), to Wonderful Vacation (a slatted Rorschach spill, half blue, half green). Each "Wonderful" makes more apparent the word's appeal to a spirit of desperate optimism in America's "opportunity society". The esthetic correlative to "wonderful" is the grid, in Feinstein's words "a code of coherence," with its infinite replication of rational order. Undergoing all manner of deformation, the grid in these paintings is never completely lost, never completely triumphant. In Wonderful News the grid is a sliding, dripping field of red, white and black patches melting into bruised purples. In S'Wonderful gridded, xeroxed color charts march around two margins of the canvas, leaving an expanse filled with a spectrum of watercolor stripes. Small ladders of drawn squares travel from one domain to the next. In A Wonderful Place to Live, one of the strongest pieces, black xerox strips with "Rochelle, IL 60168" in white form eleven square, wobbly cells on the raw linen. Abstraction is both form and content in these paintings, but in a way that regards it not as the subject, but as one of the many subjects that a painting can hold at once. So while these paintings share the look of various abstract styles, the spin provided by language and dark humor gives abstraction a cagey, vernacular inflection. These paintings are mostly intimate, with the sense that we are witnessing a process that is personal, informal and largely mysterious. A few of the images have a grand declamatory presence, like the yellow Venetian blinds of Wonderful Vision or the white St. Andrew's cross on fluorescent orange of Wonderful Light. The final painting of the group, Wonderful Country brings together both tendencies, with its puzzle squares of curdled pastels revealing a lower level of colored newspaper food ads, varnished to a high sheen. Cicely Cottingham's "True Blue" series are paintings in a hypnagogic, poetic mode. While highly personal, they adhere to a tradition of the psyche as esthetic muse that runs from the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists to the Neo-Expressionists. This is fictive art which asks only complete belief. In each painting, four plywood panels form a vertical grid. The loosely painted, layered images both react to and transcend this ruling structure. The images themselves are a shifting, often dream- bound vocabulary of figures and objects, abstracted into schematic gestures. Usually dominated by shimmering greens and blues, they convey a sense of an inner life submerged in a watery, vegetative state. The striated, scumbled, scratched-into paint takes on a mediumistic function, as the "voice" of the cryptic images. Individual paintings are dominated by various motifs, which then recur in other compositions, abstracted and recontextualized. In Song it is the figures embracing across the painting's center spine. In House it is a peaked-roof structure divided into four "rooms". In Rent it is two figures divided across a charged space. There is an equality among images in Key, with the four quadrants of the panels keeping a tipping boat, a jar and two calligraphic figures in a kind of unstable equilibrium. The single undulating female nude in Inn makes explicit the erotic undercurrent running through the whole series. A series of highly worked abstract pencil drawings accompany the paintings. Denise Mullen's books combine photography and traditional bookbinding techniques. The accordion-format books, which range from three to five or six pages, have moody black and white photographs of a variety of locations in Hawaii, Italy and Spain. While there are photographs of unpeopled interiors and church facades, most are of pristine, rather mysterious landscapes. All have a 19th-century feel to them. The books' leather covers are embossed with motifs drawn from the various locations. The total effect is that of a particularly luxurious cache of Victorian travel souvenirs. Rochelle Feinstein, "The Wonderfuls," Sept. 11-Nov. 2, 1996. Cicely Cottingham, "Paintings From True Blue," Sept. 11-Nov. 16, 1996. Denise Mullen, "Book Structures," Sept. 11- Nov. 16, 1996. September 11-November 16 The Jersey City Museum, 472 Jersey Ave., Jersey City, N.J. (201) 547-4514 JOHN MENDELSOHN is a New York artist who occasionally writes on art.