San Francisco Chronicle: Galleries
Saturday April 20, 1991
Kenneth Baker

Dunphy, and Provisor at Art Institute

Tellingly different attitudes toward decoration are apparent in the work of Didi Dunphy and Janis Provisor at the San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street (through May 8).

Dunphy's three canvases are prime examples of what I call comic abstraction. They respect, and are even a little wistful for, the utopian earnestness that marked early 20th century abstract art. Yet they argue that if abstract painting has a future, it does not lie in the direction of pretended "purity" or idealism.

For Dunphy, there can be no pattern, no possible pictorial composition, that is not already stamped with references to art history or to mundane culture. She proclaims this view by making abstract paintings that look like tie-dyed fabrics from the '60s. She uses me same eye-poppmg dyes and similar techniques to produce a weird hybrid of color-field painting and hippie-nostalgia. She coats her canvases with varnish to make them look sealed against time.

Dunphy's paintings cause a nice collision of expressionist, formalist and pop esthetics. And they are tough. They may appear garish and available, but they resist any approach that is not wryly critical.