Vita Petersen's new paintings are like pages from the journal of an artist who has spent a lifetime in her studio, each day looking and exploring, listening to what was trying to speak in this line and that shape, this color and that constellation. Some of her forms are quiet -- staring or sitting alone. More are in motion, with an occasionally anxious but usually confident, even frenetic energy. They assemble and meet, tumble and spin. Even in shocked immobility or reverentially still, they seem busy. Petersen's line has a marvelous assurance and suppleness. It demarcates and displaces, asserts or retreats. It can swing into the arc of a hummingbird's flight, or harden into an oar or pole, or the armature of a chair or table. Her passages and fields of color have fluid identities as well. They can have a prayerful stillness; they can coalesce and thicken, and, like a watchful parent, stand above the animation in their midst; they can squeeze around and between the fragmented, even broken, yet oddly complete forms, locking them in.

Memory has an irrepressible, almost physical force here. Everything Petersen has lived and seen seems to want to gather and act. These paintings are alive with people and talk, flowers and fires, cooking and planting, dinners and dreams. Most of all, they are permeated with conversations. The passionate discursiveness, as well as the heavily psychologized silences, in many European drawing rooms before World War II can be felt in these paintings' hints of Old World interiors. They speak, too, of a lifetime of internal exchanges with Vuillard, Bonnard, Nolde and Matisse. And of decades of actual exchanges with Hofmann, Gorky and de Kooning, and with many other artist friends, who, like her, helped transport the textures of modernist Europe into postwar America. And with Pollock -- whose meteoric rise and fall Petersen witnessed -- who brought into the fabric of European art a particularly American restlessness and reach. These and a myriad of other voices seem to press into these paintings, to come at them from all sides, and to flow not only into them but also beyond them, evoking not just these voices’ traditions and histories, but also a future large enough to contain them. It is rare to come across paintings in which the past demands the future and memory produces hope. In which the intensely personal is also intensely social. In which a multitude of intimacies and stories re-emerge as invitations to begin.