Jodie Manasevit offers abstract paintings of sensitive surface and provocative color that, within their modest size, provide focused pools of intensity. Dabs of color float, and sometimes march, across pulsing fields of carefully calibrated affect. Manasevit is a master colorist whose pallet reaches back to decades of combinations and relationships, preferring strong purples, teals, soft pinks and modulated whites. Approaching the meditative quality of monochromes, her paintings remain animated and dazzled by color, sometimes asserting the edge or reframing our compositional attention. It remains important to not only see the paintings, but to be with them, a projected ethos that increasingly seems fraught. Manasevit’s paintings are by no means contentious, quite the opposite, but when found in a historical context that denies attention, they are prepared to assert their might
