James Auer
Milwaukee Journal
Sunday, September 2, 1990, Entertainment, page E8

Englander’s intensity carries the day

Manitowoc Wisconsin – Patience, prudence and precise craftsmanship aren’t always valued in today’s eclectic art world, but they are the principal virtues of Lisa Englander’s solo show at the Rahr-West Museum here through September 16.

Englander, a Brooklyn born resident of Racine, Wisconsin, is a miniaturist of unquestioned gifts.

She is also a watercolorist and a collagist whose tiny, intricately patterned creations, bearing such flavorsome titles as “Alisander” and “Caerleon,” evoke thoughts of quilting and stitchery in the manufacture of tissue-paper flowers

To see the highlights of 10 years of Englander’s efforts in a single cavernous room, (augmented, in this case by a hallway gallery) is, in a sense intimidating. Simply to consider so much devoted labor compressed into a few hundred square yards of space is, in a way, unsettling.

But Englander, a paragon of taste, balance in harmony in a distinctly tasteless, unbalanced and unharmonic society, would obviously have it no other way. As a result, this show, her largest and most impressive to date, is unlike any other you’re likely to come across this season.

There is “quality” here, true, but it is quality in a classic, easily, quantifiable, unabashed elitist sense that few arbiters of aesthetic acceptability seem to want to confront today.

There is a gentility, too, along with a sort of sexual politicization - dealing with the implications and resonances of so-called “women’s work” – that makes its point subtly and diplomatically rather than with slapdash theatricality.

Trained is a graphic artist (under Anthony Stoeveken) at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Englander has brought to her watercolor paintings and collages many of the disciplines associated with relief and intaglio printing.

Her edges, done without guides and templates of any sort, are clean and crisp, her layerings and patternings – almost Escherlike in their fool-the-eye realism – amazingly persuasive.

Admittedly, Englander is functioning with a limited vocabulary of forms: fans, jars, vases, paper, cutouts, inverted bouquets of unfamiliar flowers. But the self-imposed limitations seem to have brought out an almost unbelievable fecundity, stimulating endless variations on related things without, obvious redundancy.

If the show has a drawback, it is that the diminutive scale of the work, in combination with the vastness of the showcase, leads to an impression of sameness.

Still, Englander’s is a unique gift, one to be treasured. Elegant, restrained, and understated, it may have a hard time prevailing in an era of overblown ideas, raucous showmanship, and blatantly overdone self-promotion.