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 n Anne Seidman's new paintings, fields of color meet at pressured edges that are as charged with energetic friction as tectonic plates. When the energy of these fault lines reverberates back into the color, each area is vitalized with restlessness and with unique tensile strength. The sum of energies in each painting never quiets. There is often an astigmatic torque in her compositions, as interlocking self-interests exert individual ambitions against the contested boundaries that keep them apart.
 Painting is endlessly fertile, especially for painters and viewers who surrender completely to its powers and charms. Seidman shows that there is plenty of life in geometric abstraction, especially as she causes its geometry to suffer compromises of perpendicularity and rectitude. Her particular concentration of energies at each edge, and a frequent witholding of a fullness of palette are mild torments that make these paintings unlike any others. Her paintings radiate with unexpected qualities, notably characteristics usually reserved for conscious entities, such as purpose and will. While these paintings look superficially like freewheeling and even casual abstractions, they are the outcome of a process that is simultaneously highly spontaneous and profoundly disciplined. That spontaneity does not equate chaos and that discipline does not equate rigidity, but that, instead, each quality fuels and elevates the other, is the paradoxical heart of her long and refined practice as a reflective, highly creative, and self-critical artist.
Her work has an ethic: to conserve individuality and life in every color, shape, form and gesture, to make no sacrifices of one for another. This is coincident with an ecological conscience. While her marks are spontaneous, they are made without bravura. Thus, while there is vivid and unique personality at work in every square inch, cumbersome and deadening ego is altogether absent. Her decisions stem from judgment, and while her judgment is restrained, her execution is sponñ taneous. Measured, and ultimately intricately elegant, her work builds local awkwardnesses into overall grace. This is pure painting, free of contaminating extraneous subject matter, ideology, style, theory, and doctrine. Throughout her career, Anne Seidman has followed this course. For her, painting is an adventure in exploring free action within parameters of color and form. By way of choosing freedom as a goal, she succeeds in distinguishing what is undecidable from questions that merely conceal implied but inevitable answers. It is from these undecidables that, with her perservering and alert intelligence, she teases out the new from the strange. Her courage and faith is to pursue the difficult and discordant in art toward a seamless whole which, in the end, is always found to resemble and embody integrity itself. -Frank Galuszka
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