Artist Captures The Shapes Of Memory

Barbara Marks​‘s new paintings are attired in bright, warm colors and shapes that seem to invite you into the room to hear what they’re saying to each other.

She has an idea what they’re chattering about, but she’s not about to tell you. That’s your job.

You can get close to the conversation on Saturday, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the DaSilva Gallery on Whalley Avenue in Westville, where Marks is hosting the opening reception of her show, which runs through Oct. 1 and is called ​“Recollection.”

She’s showing about 30 paintings, all unframed eight-by-eight-inch images that deploy color and shape in such a way that at least this viewer feels as if all the works — like pieces in a crossword puzzle or letters in a great longest-word-ever in Scrabble — might, if you look the other way, rearrange themselves and perhaps exchange elements.

This is not Marks’s intention. Each of the works, though modest in size and intimate in statement, represents an independent painterly thought, Marks said during the final hanging of the show in the run-up to the opening.

“Each of these is a complete thought or concept for me,” she said. What interests her is the way the color and the shapes interact to create space and perhaps imagery within the boundaries of each individual work.

The works derive from memories or views that are either ingrained within her or began with a drawing and a photograph. Then the ​“visual thought process” kicked in.

“I’m interested in the thoughts behind these paintings,” Marks said. ​“I’m interested in the economy of abstraction. How much info do I need to give to convey these objects?” she said.

For example, Marks said that ​“No. 17” — she doesn’t specifically name the images so as not to interfere with the viewer’s narrative ideas — derives from a view out her Stony Creek kitchen, across neighbors’ lawns and through hedges, to the waters in front of the Thimble Islands.

In satisfying her own ​“thought” that she conveyed this with economy and completeness, Marks, who was a book and graphic designer for decades before taking up formal fine art studies, said she is very happy for us to read it utterly differently, as an image or even as a geometric abstraction.

“I’m also interested in ambiguity,” she said, but was at pains to add: ​“Some people misconstrue it as confusion.”

She pointed to ​“No. 32” and said the painting began as a large red circle. However, that wasn’t working, and so she painted it over in a flatter color, a grey-brown that overlaps and interacts with the shapes around it with an utterly different feel.

“You might feel it’s a bird’s eye view,” she said of the image.

I might feel it is indeed an aerial view, not of colors and shapes for their own sake, but of someone, a boy perhaps wearing a beret with edges that extend over ears and nose, or any other identifying human features.

“There’s more than one read. Whatever your interpretation is, that’s what I’m interested in,” she said, while emphasizing that her thought process was in creating a self-contained ​“color world” and a world of shapes.

“I had a relationship to this painting” when she was working on it, she said. ​“Now I exit the scene. You’re the viewer and you make observations. I’m not trying to make enigmatic paintings or to puzzle the viewer.”

And yet to this viewer at least, the paintings individually do puzzle, and in the good way of meeting a new interesting face that you might study to figure out. Those faces exist in a sometimes teasing zone between representation and abstraction, which makes most of the compositions accessible but not boring.

All this makes the show richer.

A self-confessed ​“serial painter,” Marks works out the larger idea behind the individual thoughts in creating series. For example, birthday cakes, which she deployed in a 2009 exhibition of monotypes, could appear first as objects of memory, then as cylinders, and take on other meanings or thought-bearing shapes or areas of color.

The completeness of ​“Recollection,” to me, is in the way colors and shapes appear and reappear in the works. Because the works are small, you can take them in several at a time. They have a group life in addition to the ​“thought” of each individually and the idea of the whole.

“Recollection” is all new work, created in the spring. Last winter Marks scored a prestigious residency at the American Academy in Rome, where over six weeks she produced another series of images on paper. She’ll be showing those next month at the Armory during the upcoming Citywide Open Studios.