Review/Art; For Judy Pfaff, Moderation at Last The New York Times September 28, 1990 By ROBERTA SMITH LEAD: Judy Pfaff's art has always been suspended between painting and sculpture, wall and floor, and high and low culture. But her latest constructions bridge these gaps with a finesse and efficiency that make them among the best of her 20-year career. Beautifully engineered and esthetically focused, these new Pfaffs achieve liftoff. Judy Pfaff's art has always been suspended between painting and sculpture, wall and floor, and high and low culture. But her latest constructions bridge these gaps with a finesse and efficiency that make them among the best of her 20-year career. Beautifully engineered and esthetically focused, these new Pfaffs achieve liftoff. Far lighter and leaner than Frank Stella's off-the-wall projections, they appear to spring forward and hang there, each a distinct midair explosion. In general, Ms. Pfaff is doing more with less; her compositions are profuse without being excessive, exuberant without being manic. In a sense, she has combined the nonchalance of early 70's Process Art - her esthetic roots - with a high-tech suavity that seems more late 80's Neo-Geo. But Ms. Pfaff's high-tech always has low-cost flair, a sense of Woolworth's meets Bauhaus that gives her essentially formal art a sharp yet celebratory social edge. Each work is a kind of elusive still life in which abstract form, everyday objects and tensile effusions of wire intermingle, but the dominant motifs vary tremendously. In the show's biggest piece, the stage is dominated by plastic spheres and flat wood disks, whose brightly painted surfaces evoke both graffiti and diagrams of the planets. A relatively small work incorporates olive-oil cans and other containers, green punch cups sliced in half and lavender plastic drinking glasses. In a third piece, appropriately titled ''Eames,'' the forms are all made of bent plywood. A fourth work features circles of glass whose concentric lines evoke Duchamp's rotary disks. A particularly effective device that adds both color and animation to several pieces is the pinioning of small plastic fruits and vegetables on individual cantilevers of wire. The technical precision of these pieces stems from Ms. Pfaff's newly streamlined, thoroughly integrated wire armatures. These often have a dazzling pencil-line thinness and are so full of tricks and visual entendres that they almost qualify as sculpture on their own. Not only do they get the more solid parts of each work aloft, but they also break into intricate improvisations - sharply angled trumpet shapes here, cascading circles there, serpentine sidewinding elsewhere. Sometimes echoeing the outlines of the objects they support, they engulf nearly every piece in a pulsating haze of line and silhouette and three-dimensional drawing. When Ms. Pfaff falters, as she does in one work that incorporates an old Coca-Cola sign, it is because the objects take over and the structural logic and extravagance of the wire is blocked out. But otherwise, in the finely tuned tension between the engineered and the decorative, Ms. Pfaff has added a new, impressive duality to her list of characteristic oppositions. Judy Pfaff's new wall constructions remain at the Max Protetch Gallery, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, through Oct. 27. view article on New York Times website Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company