New York Times: Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne's paintings feel as if they're in motion. Her strokes, squiggles and streaks of color hold together enough to create recognizable forms, but also often look like they might rearrange themselves at any moment. This is especially true of her large portraits of the actress Gena Rowlands, one of which beckons from the farthest wall of the gallery. Her blue eyes are set in a look of knowing resignation, but the kinetic dance of the rest of her face suggests a woman whose emotions are ever mutable.

Borrowing from the language of film, the exhibition is titled "Long and Short Shots." The latter category includes a selection of small, srappy paintings in the vein of what the artist is best known for: bawdy, hazy scenes that mix human and animal, the mythological and scatological, to evoke a funnier, more mysterious and queer reality than our own.

Dufresne scales that up in her "long shots," a series of big, stunning paintings featuring groups and crowds. The best are tableaus that refer to the old masters, but without religion or moralizing. Instead, naked boys gleefully urinate off a balcony, and people and sea creatures have an orgy (I think). "Examinations" (2020) has an ominous tinge, with its swirling mass of figures tangled in a spectacle of scrutiny.

Dufresne renders these scenes in outline atop more free-form painted backgrounds that compete for attention, giving them a spectral quality. Neither dreams nor nightmares, the works seem closer to hallucinations- the teeming, transgressive imaginings of a liberated hand and mind.