Janis Provisor's Resuscitative Abstraction

Janis Provisor: You Know What I Mean” installation view, Magenta Plains, New York.

By EDWARD WAISNIS November 22, 2025

The title of this exhibition, contrary to it’s assertiveness, might be interpreted as a plaintive plea. Or, more reasonably, with its pointed lack of a concluding question mark, a declarative statement made by a seasoned painter who has reached a stage in her career where her bearings are sure-footed. With a concise suite of six same sized canvases, all from this year, Provisor continues her recent tact with a line of feral evocative abstraction.

Given Provisor’s point of origin–as a member of the stable at the legendary Holly Solomon Gallery, in the late 70s and into the 80s, during  a transitional point in art history; namely: the closure of Modernism that gave way to Pluralism–resulted in work that encapsulated the period. Provisor suffered, in a sense, from her association with the Solomon galleries program, given that it championed a group of quirky artists that were characterized as something of outsider fringe figures. Many of them trafficking in work that involved non-tradition high art materials–sewing; ceramics; video; audio–including Kim MacConnel, Nicholas Africano, Mary Heilmann, Robert Kushner, Judy Pfaff, William Wegman and Laurie Anderson. Through this connection, as well as her work landing adjacent to the New Image painters, Provisor slotted into a not so favorable niche that she has now broken out from.

Sidelined for nearly a decade by a separate career in the manufacture of rugs (together with fellow painter and husband Brad Davis) Provisor’s mid-career work cross-pollinated, to some degree, with this absorbing endeavor. Though she eschews any association between the hand-knotted rugs and her painting despite the evidence that she created the designs for the Fort Street Studio wares, and her canvases from that period mimicing some of the qualities that she gained from the parallel experience, including the use of metallic highlights.

Of particular note, from this time was the introduction of airy washes and biomorphic shapes that appeared to align with Bill Jensen’s work of the same period that continues, and is expanded upon, in the new work. And, while that work was bereft of figurative elements found in earlier work, it now ebbs back in with cameo appearances.

Janis Provisor, “Beam Me Away Scottie”, 2025, watercolor, water soluble oil, pen, chalk, and pencil on linen, 74 x 62 inches.
 

Beam Me Away Scottie, Party Girl, Thinking Thomas and Come Closer offer variations of flourishes against a black ground, amongst the hermetic vacuum of an airless expanse. From this Existential depth, historically associated with the Ab Ex profundity of Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, Provisor deploys tropes closer to Francis Picabia and Sigmar Polke’s responses to the negation. Provisor’s swipes of a loaded brush puts in mind Julian Schnabel’s ham-fisted approach more than the pseudo-calligraphy of James Nares' soppy mop passes.

Provisor begins composing with skittish markings, in the tradition of automatic writing, in scratchy pencil and crayon, that serves as a foundation that is, ultimately, consumed and partially obliterated by passages of overlaid paint, nevertheless remains peek out of the bold schemes that come to predominate like an archaeological revealation, or, more perversely, the graffitos in a bathroom stall.

Beam Me Away Scottie puts one inside a confining ill-defined chamber. Ranging from subtle washes to strident accents of white and yellow–achieved through a melange of watercolor, water soluble oil, chalk, pen and pencil over the black gesso–evince a confounding atmosphere akin to a back room of a sultry nightclub. In the far distance a window, of sorts, entities in it’s capture of a view beyond; an alien landscape that beckons.
 

Janis Provisor, “Thinking Thomas”, 2025, watercolor, Flashe, pencil, and marker on linen, 74 x 62 inches.

Party Girl and Thinking Thomas center gossamer clusters of draping structures reminiscent of  splayed garments of indeterminable design in their rumpled state. Pooled and slashing brushwork predominate, mounted atop of which, in the case of Thinking Thomas, balances what appears to be an oxidized head form resembling something between an asiatic sculpture and a bust of Mussolini in profile (Or, maybe I am only interrupting it a such given that the movement he coined is ascendent in our own times?).
 

Janis Provisor, “Come Closer”, 2025, watercolor, black gesso, pen, pencil and crayon linen, 74 x 62 inches.

Come Closer’s billowy white veil, seemingly derived from the specter of popular lore, coined somewhere between Edvard Munch’s scream and Victorian literature-cum-golden-age-Hollywood manifestations of spirits from another realm, predominates. Wistfully lingering over a lined up field of regimentally placed rows of various sized black ‘dots’ that transmit a digital screen essence managing to connote the era of The Matrix; alternately, a post-broadcast TV left on to electronic fuzz.

Superlover and Give Me Hope delve into rich crimson shades, bringing punch. Superlover lays out a rickety fence-like structure, over a deep rouge field, that supports a balloon-like dark shroud which is animated by eyeholes that encapsulate suspended piercing ‘pupils’ that completes an effect relating to Guston’s hoods more than the ‘ghost’ of Come Closer. 
 

Janis Provisor, “Give Me Hope”, 2025, watercolor, Flashe, pencil, crayon, marker, and pen on linen, 74 x 62 inches.

Give Me Hope is a show-stealer with a reverie of a rosy quagmire of washes of pink dancing around a frieze of half-materialized panels of indistinct images, executed in wispy grays that come close to reproducing faded newspaper photos, or comic book images, lending an enticing sense of mystery. Here the pencil/crayon jottings read as journal entries that adds to this covert quality.

Provisor’s renewed emergence (evidenced by this exhibition as well as a smaller one this past Autumn at Canada) solidifies her place, at a time of a veracious appetite for painting, with work that leans on historical precedents–her own as well as art historically–while fully engaging with a way forward. Through aesthetic probing, Provisor answers the query posed by the show’s title with work that sparks open-ended discovery, as I have engaged with here, therefore allowing for a range of possibilities rather than a definitive locked-in conclusion.

Janis Provisor: You Know What I Mean
Magenta Plains
149 Canal Street, New York, NY 10002
November 6–December 20, 2025