Perle Fine never wavered in her dedication to abstraction. Several of the painters involved in the Abstract Expressionist movement—of which Fine was a founding member—dipped in and out of pure abstraction: Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter, even Jackson Pollock at the end. Others, like Fine, Mark Rothko, and Lee Krasner, never yielded to figuration and pushed back against the age-old question applied to clouds and modern painting alike: what does it look like? For Fine, now the subject of a solo exhibition at Berry Campbell, the whole point was that it didn’t look like anything. The eyes were meant to be confounded, because even though they were the vehicle of apprehension, there was no necessary connection between what they apprehended and the catalogue of images available for reference in the mind.
Wall of Silence (1961) is a monumental example of Fine’s hallucinogenic vision, measuring fourteen feet wide across two canvases. The painting is mostly composed of black, dark green, and brown forms which loom and skirt across the picture plane. They refuse to act like shapes with which we are familiar—they don’t imitate people or mountains, trees, and other landscape elements. While some have volume and dimension, others are simply line. Here Fine has invented a world where gravity is only incidental, and space accordions between depth and flatness at the whim of the painter. This allows her to focus on how, for example, a miraculous patch of red in the upper right-hand corner gently wrests our attention from the slouching darkness on the opposite end of the epic painting, offering the viewer a compositional choreography that denies illusion.
— Will Corwin, Brooklyn Rail
