You would be hard pressed not to be taken in, to be swayed with compelling works on paper by a Mexican artist Shirley Chernitsky. Particularly in light of recent events in world history and in our own small domain in the United States where a major blackout of the East Coast took place and memorial services regarding September 11th are about to unfold. It is very difficult to look at this work without being reminded of W.B.Yeats's lines of nearly three-quarters of a century ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

It is not by chance or accidents that Kandinsky once remarked that artists are the antennae of their age. Chernitsky seems to epitomize the sensations of modern-day living; comic and cosmic futility, upheaval as the order of the day, uncertainty and the carnivalesque upending of roles and functions. In "Three Houses", for example, a small work from 2001 the artist typifies her command of her material. We are in a groundless universe where debris and parts of domiciles and living structures seem to pivot, pirouette and tumble into space. Each area of recognizable reality seems to fulfill its destiny in this cosmological dance. Each part is intact and integral in itself while allowing itself to participate in a collective balancing act, optically. The result is a work which celebrates autonomous forms within a network of associations and resemblances culled from the world of representation. I am of course alluding to Chernitsky's uncanny play of space which participates in the universal non-differentiated space of classic abstraction of say, mid-career Kandinsky, while tethering this abstraction within the locus of representation. Her interaction of colored bands and areas of pure space seem perfectly at home within the depiction of unique objects and forms referring to actual living spaces and their materials. Two perceptions are held in suspension: that of the re-presentation of objects in the real-life world and an optical code which stresses an irreconcilable dissolving of the empirical. How to describe this visual prowess? One way is to suggest that Chernitsky has an uncanny way of expressing what John Keats called negative capacity an imaginative capability on the part of a truly creative individual to allow for ambiguity and uncertainty to pool and ebb in consciousness without grasping for anchors in the world of rationality and empiricism. What Chernitsky evidently has learned and what she transmits in all of her mature work is this capability of suggesting freedom within chaos as well as an underlying sense of structure and harmony simultaneously. A neat trick if you can do it. Few artists have the emotional fortitude or the intellectual reach to make a visual image cohere so effectively on the brink of disintegration as does Chernitsky. I think, too, that the artist has been developing her work, raising the stakes for herself, lifting the bar. By that I mean that if one would compare a work such as "My Cabin" (2001) comparing it to a 1993 work such as "Hurricane" one could make easy parallels between Chernitsky's earlier and later use of a centralized amalgamation of forms to direct the eye, to anchor it in relation to the atmospheric and pyrotechnic effusiveness of her confetti lines and sweeping arcs of which offer a sense of distant space. However, "My Cabin" clearly denotes a change in approach on the part of the artist. Here Chernitsky toys and teases with the viewer with her usual suggestive aplomb. The scene is redolent with the rays of an over looking sun, the cabin recalls a cabin-boat languorously floating amidst the cacophony of force-lines, scalloped spaces, ribbons of colors which surround it. Yet there is something well defined in the center of the cabin, an implied fortitude or will that lends a strong sense of narrativity to this image that is bold and direct. How far this artist has come from, say, "Playing In the Ocean" 1999, a confrontational 55"x74" work which offers a setting of dazzling complexity of imbricated forms yet whose energy levels off and assumes a quietude which is hardly matched in the rest of the artist's oeuvre. What is particularly satisfying with Chernitsky's images is her sense of scale which pictorially is amplified and given lift through her use of smoldering pastel hues. It is the delicacy of this touch combined with a near-raucous vitality that allows these visual cocktails to unleash their unsuspecting kick. There is clearly a sense of renewal and comic-tragic urgency in each of her paintings that surges through her splintered and kaleidoscopic-like narratives. The emotional tenor of her work is what keeps the viewer involved in the artists unfolding quest for clarity. What do we see through Shirley Chernitsky's eyes? The great dervish-world wobbly spins and in so doing we spin our lives in it and on it in a great dance of fragility and short-livedness. The artist has developed a quickened sketch shorthand to bring in all the conventional features of representational art, such as internal formal relationships, illusionism, representation and narrative content, gesture and inflection. Yet she has had a not-so-modest level of daring in reducing extraneous elements and eliminating cumbersome and necessary components to arrive at work that is poetically suggestive of energetic efflorescence and near-chaos without falling into hyperbole or artifice. Finally, what is undeniable in this work is its capacity to evoke the best of what creativity can produce. Fresh spontaneity and a guiless appetite for an impassioned handiwork punctuates her individuated self-expression. At the core of Shirley Chernitsky's work lies an unquieted conviction that moves us all.

Dominique Nahas is an art writer based in Manhattan.