BY ROBERTA SMITH
Stephanie Theodore Gallery
580 Broadway (near Houston Street)
SoHo
Through Oct. 26
Suzanne McClelland’s first solo exhibition introduces an artist who is trying to make paint do things it hasn’t done before. She specializes in a kind of hallucinatory surge in which language, material and emotion join together for results that are random and primitive and that avoid the traditional niceties of paint. Ms. McClelland’s fluid surfaces are more spilled than painted, and some of their scattered marks gradually reveal themselves to be fragmented letters of the works’ titles, but only after a good bit of looking. As words like “Now,” “Forever” and “Till” emerge from these unaccommodating surfaces, the paintaings convey a sensibility that is both feminine and feminist, that obliquely recounts suffering and patience while adamantly refusing to suffer or be patient any longer.
