David Rhodes reviews the recent exhibition Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

Rhodes writes: "Always conscious of the transient pleasures of the fugitive moment, Freilicher made paintings poignant with the passing of experience and never-to-be-retrieved time. As with Bonnard—but without that artist’s languorousness—it is the detail and atmosphere of unemphasized living that is presented, explored, and valued. There is an immediacy or 'quick light,' as Alex Katz has described it. Some simple objects on a shelf or small table, combined with a rural vista or city view, are often enough for a subject… 'Painter in the Studio' (1987) finds Freilicher behind the easel à la Velázquez, reflected in a vertical mirror positioned in the corner of a studio and flanked by windows opening onto a bucolic stretch of Long Island. The inside and outside of the room—and the real and reflected of the mirror—overlap in formal repetitions of tall rectangles, like a fugue extoling the constant two-way traffic between interior and exterior, consciousness and perception."