Color Form
McHenry County College
February 21 - February 23, 2024
Trevor Power, Art Gallery Curator
What does it mean to destroy a painting in order to save it? In Color Form, Jean Alexander Frater answers this question through a process that is as much an act of physical reckoning as it is artistic creation. Working from monumental color field paintings, canvases three to five times the scale of the finished works, Frater tears her paintings into strips and uses those same materials to rebuild, compress, and reconstitute them into the objects presented here. The result is a body of work that carries within it the memory of its own undoing.
Scale, in Frater’s hands, is not simply a formal concern; it is the engine of meaning. The original paintings are made large so they can be made small again; their reduction is purposeful, a condensing that intensifies rather than diminishes. What emerges from this process is something caught between states: part painting, part textile, part sculpture. The works resist easy categorization, and in that resistance lies their power.
Alexander Frater thinks of her large fields of color as “bodies” — a term that carries weight throughout the work. As the torn strips are woven and layered back together, those bodies push outward. Alexander Frater calls these projections “bumps” and “appendages”: organic protrusions that swell beyond the frame, refuse the flatness of the wall, and insist on occupying real space. The works are not representations of physical presence; they are physical presence. They breathe, they expand, they lean.
Color here is never merely decorative. In the woven and stacked strips, individual hues pulse with a vibrancy that flat paint cannot achieve, pink against olive, slate blue against warm cream, the acid charge of yellow at the edge of grey. Color becomes structure. It holds the body together even as the body strains against its own edges. The question Alexander Frater poses at the outset — what is the weight of color? — is answered not in words but in the works themselves, which you can feel bearing down from the wall.
The two galleries at McHenry County College present distinct registers of Alexander Frater’s practice in conversation with one another. In one room, large woven panels — their surfaces textured like gathered fabric, their colors shifting in subtle gradients from navy to teal, from blush to sand- occupy the walls with a quiet monumentality. In the other, smaller works assert themselves with greater drama: a coiled grey strap loops down from a white field where pink forms undulate; a diagonal composition in cobalt and gold curls open at its edges like something mid-unfold. Together, the two spaces trace the range of what a painting can become when it is willing to stop being a painting.
Jean Alexander Frater’s work invites us to reconsider what we expect from an art object: where it ends, what it is made of, and what survives the process of making. Color Form offers no easy resolution to those questions. What it offers instead is something rarer — the visible evidence of a mind working through them, and a body of objects that bear the marks of that inquiry with honesty, rigor, and uncommon beauty.