The action escalates to drama. A line zig-zags against a curved array of points. Another undulates through flooding light towards marshalled dots. An arc bends back and veers from a front of rooted stalks. Some dramas enact their contrasts within the c anvas, but not all borders close. Some lines cross edges, as if pressing in from elsewhere: some intersect and anchor, others size each other up across the canvas, joined in standing off. Attraction and repulsion alternate in contrasting narratives of uni ty in design.

Drawn ever more deeply into looking, I begin to see how these paintings work. Through the eye they charm, then startle and alert the mind. They hint at analogues with nature. Prompting adventure into metaphor they stir imaginings from the intimate dyna mics of a nucleus to the civil dispositon of certain landscapes, broad compass of geography and sweep of cosmic force. They remap nature into mind.

Nature long has fascinated Sarah Plimpton. Setting out to explore it through biology and medicine, she felt drawn to art. Dissatisfied at what science could not show, she turned to writing and painting, first in prose fiction and traditional landscape. Moving to London, then Paris, she experimented. Her fiction grew shorter and ever more involved with the experiences of language and sight evolving finally into poetry. Likewise her painting moved from landscape to engage the underlying dynamics of color and form. Now in her native New York for more than a decade, she has explored etching and typography: in composing books she creates new significance by juxtaposing words and patterns with the materiality of pages and boards.

In an age when some artists despair of art and grope for significance through gestures dramatizing self and aimed at social shock, Sarah Plimpton puts faith in art. Without fanfare she recaptures and reactivates our native capacity to imagine. She jolt s us gently out of inertia in language and sight. She entices us to engage in metaphor. Her works initiate us to the age-old mysteries of likeness felt in certain dolmens and roods or in drawings on ancient vessels and utensils or cavern ceilings and wall s.