Jill Nathanson's Cadence exhibition at Berry Campbell explores color, light, and musical abstraction

Jill Nathanson's exhibition Cadence ran from May 24 to June 30, 2018 at Berry Campbell gallery located at 530 West 24th Street in New York City. The show featured structured pourings of clear, vivid color that emphasized translucency and luminosity. Nathanson's paintings, including works like Evening Pinwheel (2017), Chant (2018), Holding Summer (2017), Leitmotif (2018), Morning's Address (2017), Key of Be (2016), and Thoroughfare (2017), explore relationships between light, space, color, and gravity through large translucent shapes that gather and overlap on canvas. Her technique involves horizontal pour-and-tilt methods with taped limitations, creating edges that generate quiet dynamism. Color transitions in works like Leitmotif move from burnished orange to cool violet with unplaceable sienna shades, creating active picture planes where colors advance and recede. Nathanson's approach originated from experimental collages using colored gel lenses from theatrical lighting, treating color as energy rather than physical pigment. The paintings evoke musical qualities through titles and compositional rhythms, with forms that suggest vast spaces or intimate enclosures. Her palette includes bold petal-pinks, corals, purples, and crimsons that shift between warm and cool effects. The exhibition demonstrated Nathanson's continued investigation of color as both subject and shaping force in abstraction, with works that avoid becoming static through fluid, vital compositions.