Angela Fraleigh was once told by an instructor that her paintings were well-behaved. In response, she started making nasty, lurid scenes of women trapped in ambiguously sexual power plays. Her sickly hued and realistically modeled figures barely hold their own beneath pools and gobs—gooey confections and infections—of thrown resin paint.
Four of these large-scale social and material disasters are underway on the walls of the James Harris Gallery. This is the former Seattleite’s first show there. (Now she lives in New York and Pennsylvania.) Also on display are a handful of small watercolor studies on Mylar, washy and muted psychological portraits that reveal Fraleigh’s ability to evoke loaded gestures using minimal strokes.
Study #19 (2007) affectingly depicts a nude woman’s restrained and mysterious agony as she leans against a man behind her and stares cautiously into the distance. Fraleigh turns that coupling into the full-scale oil painting if understood lately (2007), in which the woman’s wary eye peers out from the center of the panel, surrounded by dark masses of thrown resin that swallow her pink-purple neck and chest as the obscured man holds a hand to her face. Abstraction acts as Victorian curtain and also plastic surgery: The resin and pigment stain her face gray and yellow and push underneath his face as if peeling his skin.
In the larger works, Fraleigh is attempting to marry the stiffness of 16th-century mannerism—marked by individual artists’ styles or manners rather than Renaissance ideals of harmony and balance—with postpainterly abstraction and a free-floating sense of feminist terror. And, like many contemporary painters, she struggles with background, or eschews it entirely, and sets up a tension between accidental and intentional marks.
That’s a lot of moving parts for a painting. Sometimes, as in if understood lately, the gambit works, but in other pieces, such as her most recent, all your life, the billboard-sized nudes are exposed, with only minimal abstraction. It is not only the woman’s blank blue eye that leaves the viewer cold but also the clumsy technique of the figuration and the simplistic handling of the baby-blue ground. 
