Eros According To Elaine Marinoff by Donald Kuspit

"Painted in the early eighties, Elaine Marinoff's Synergistic Series and Erotic Series are again on display. The timing couldn't be better: they are welcome additions indeed, important contributions to the post-conceptual revival of interest in bodiliness, painting, and esthetics. Indeed, each painting seems like a sensitive body in itself: built of layer upon layer of oil paint, each at once as delicate and flexible as tissue, the final result is a luminous image as smooth to the touch as skin, and as emotionally evocative. Marinoff has ingeniously translated the esthetic immediacy of the body into the esthetic immediacy of paint.

In the Synergistic Series, a naked female dancer leaps in glorious flight, as though her body will never fall back to earth. She seems suspended in the surrounding void, her luminosity invaded by its darkness, which seems to corrode her body, sometimes splitting it in half. She seems to dissolve into the nothingness, but her highspiritedness rescues her from it. She is truly majestic, a force to be reckoned with, the highlit flattened parts of her body turning her into an abstract emblem of defiant vitality. She is a mirage of flesh, shedding visibility as though eager to become pure spirit, yet clearly visible, however shadowy. She is at once amorphous and anonymous--a blurred presence in the surrounding absence--but her outline is clearly defined and firm, suggesting her integrity. If dance is the most basic art, for it celebrates the livingness of the body.

Marinoff's isolated, heroic nude--an image of the liberated female body, high on itself--is implicitly erotic, as its sensual coloration suggests, while the embracing nudes in the Erotic Series are explicitly erotic. Their sexual act has greater synergistic effect than lonely dancing: two bodies intimately interacting are more ingeniously expressive than one body in action.

The handling in both series is feverishly synergistic and abstract--the flesh is composed of the same subtle, flickering striations, each with an expressive resonance and manicured intensity of its own--but it seems denser in the Synergistic Series, as though giving weight to the body, thus emphasizing its physicality, and thinner in the Erotic Series, as though suggesting that the merger is more than physical, indeed, peculiarly spiritual or otherworldly. If, as Freud said, the difficult achievement of authentic sexuality is to unite tender feelings and lustful action, then Marinoff's Erotic Series seems to do so, with the tenderness conveyed by the delicate handling, the lust by the physical action. Marinoff is a romantic, and the romantic, as Baudelaire said, has a feeling for the infinite, which is what her dancer, leaping into the beyond, and her erotic couple, reaching beyond themselves to each other, have in common. Indeed, both dancer and couple seem infinite in themselves, as the infinite nuancing of their 'touching' appearance suggests."