ON FREEDOM & CONTROL

It is rare in today's fast-paced, media-centered art world to discover paintings that display a clear spirit and a coherent direction as Linda Saccoccio's do. Their dynamic lines, streaking across bold fields of color, soothe as they electrify and seduce as they cajole. Emerging from the state of physical and mental lucidity that the artist consciously fosters, they read to the viewer as essays in freedom. Their aesthetic of jubilance and grace is the unintended outcome of the artist's search for transcendence.

Saccoccio's paintings look deceptively simple. They employ limited means that avoid confusion and congestion. They delight the eye, yet they trouble the mind. Refusing easy categorization, they exist in an anxious space between abstraction and decoration. Their style is strongly two-dimensional and toys with becoming pattern. While the play charms the eye, it is also causes one to look more carefully. The process of comparison that the paintings demand reveals the artist's risks. Her forms are consistent, but never repetitive. The ease we feel in looking at them is the result of her carefully developed patterns of control. Saccoccio's formal strength is the exuberance of her lines and colors. Her conceptual strength is the studied character of her experimentation. Together they produce her unique lyrical style. In the tradition of modernist abstraction, she has spent years establishing the formal limits within which she exerts control.