Roberta Smith
The New York Times,
October 1990
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 paintings 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.