Two Houses, Thin Lines,

1998

According to the writer Joan Didion, “The story Jennifer Bartlett tells is by no means simple. The elements she uses—the bright crayon colors, the child’s house, the child’s boat, the child’s tree—set up expectations that will be overturned, suggesting an idealized artlessness, a sentimental innocence that the finished work will belie. In her abstractions as well as in the more figurative work, the troubling question of the grid appears from the outset, the gray graph-paper tracing that grew from her attempt to paint the mathematics, paint the music, tell the story that ‘had everything in it.’” Two Houses, Thin Lines embodies the disquiet that Didion finds in the isolated, flat geometric forms of Bartlett’s recurring portraits of houses. The thin, uneven grid of lines crossing the canvas forms a scratchy scrim, evoking the imprecision of memory and something unbalanced behind the childlike configuration of two houses reduced to basic geometries.

Janna Israel, Mellon Curator of Academic Engagement, Princeton University Art Museum