Gary Komarin - "From these seemingly unlovely methods Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse's driest most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell's spare abstractions of the 1970s, or the early New Mexico and Berkeley paintings of Richard Diebenkorn," writes Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Innocence and sophistication subliminally align in Gary Komarin's work.  His abstract paintings are a witty synthesis of spontaneous gesture, geometric composition, and iconic form, with a certain tendency to monochrome.  His art is important in that it amplified the evolution of imaginative abstraction by harnessing the paradoxical randomness of nature.

Komarin takes what was once 'forbidding' and 'hermetic' - terms for abstraction in its inaugural heroic period - and makes it ironically lyric by making it playful.  He returns gesturalism to its origins in landscape, but the abstract landscape is no longer 'apocalyptic' as Kandinsky's have been said to be, but whimsical.  He takes what had become closed systems of geometrical and non-geometrical abstractions and interbreeds them.  The result is a hybrid abstraction, less heavy-handed than traditional abstraction but still emotionally serious.

For all its brooding atmospherics and sensual touches, the surface remains peculiarly inviolable.  Komarin's shapes linger on his surface, inviting us to enjoy their paradox: child-like drawings and painterly markings in a clever arrangement.  A good part of the irony is that Komarin's paintings hover indeterminately on the boundary between purity and imagery.  As soon as they seem one-sidedly abstract, they become 'impressions' of a natural environment.  This doubleness keeps them fresh even as it confirms their traditional modernism.

It is the paintings' fleeting appearance - their sense of being in timely process - that makes them emotionally engaging; the abstract composition gives them a peculiar permanence and timelessness.   -- Donald Kuspit, prominent art critic and art historian, New York 2008


 
 
 

Steven Seinberg - The soft, sensuous abstraction of Steve Seinberg celebrates the process of insemination, and honors the concept of fertility. Like the seeping of water into layers of planted soil, the thin washes of color in Seinberg's canvases penetrate imagery of seeds and pods, acknowledging the primal impulse of all natural life to regenerate.

Seinberg's art communicates in a mysterious, unobtrusive manner, speaking subtly and instinctively.  Because the various elements within his pictures are determined by what he intuits at each moment of the process of creation, every aspect and phase of his work fades in and out of the paint almost imperceptibly.

In the art world this type of light painting is commonly referred to as 'high-key painting' because it primarily uses the upper values of the dark-to-light scale.  A great deal of what we are allowed to see and not see in Seinberg's art is determined by the hiding power of these white pigments he uses.  Some have the opacity of an avalanche utterly covering all trace of the ground.  Others have the masking strength of a semitransparent layer of ice where only faint ghostlike impression of the original expression can still be seen beneath.

"To be touched by this work is not unlike experiencing a subtle glance, or a faint whisper held under the breath, or the wind's light kiss on your cheek," states art critic Robert Sherer.  "These paintings are made by a very sensitive/perceptive person for a very sensitive/perceptive audience.  This is the visual art of people who know that what is not said is often more important than the spoken word."
 


   

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