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[Epigraph]
"The expression 'Abstract Art' is not popular. And rightly so,
since it says little, or a least has a confusing effect.
... In my view, the best name would be 'real art',
because this kind of art puts a new artistic world,
spiritual in nature, alongside the external world.
A world that can be brought about only through art.
A real world."
~ Vasily Kandinsky, "Abstrakte Malerei" (Paris 1935)
This
December into January, the
Boston (USA) area
cognoscenti of good
painting are being treated
to a well-juried show, on
the subject of Abstraction
("Abstract Art:
Contemporary
Approaches",
Mosesian Center for the
Arts, Watertown MA,
until Jan.13). The need
for such a show has been
obvious, considering the
number of first-rate local
artists that work in this
mode of painting, while
being relatively ignored
these days by the larger
area institutions, most
notably the ICA (The
Boston Institute of
Contemporary Art) with its
shameful record of neglect
of local artists.
Be that as it may, the
area artists were doubly
eager to submit their work
to a now comparatively
rare pure abstraction
exhibition on this scale.
I am thus delighted to see
my larger post-minimal
painting, "The Day of
Singing", exhibited
for the first time. It is
all color... the matte and
the iridescent subtly
textured surfaces... the
sacred geometry of the
intervals organically
spaced -- the singing of
the intervals through the
veil of color and emotion.
"The Day of Singing", 40 x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm),
Oil stick, acrylic, & mixed media on wood panel, 2020
A few years ago, some of the big players in the New York Art World
confidently predicted that the latest new wave in Art shall be figurative --
bring back the figure and narrative content. Like changes of seasonal
fashion, Art could be all but decreed and steered by large international
galleries and major thematic art fairs.
Fortunately and unexpectedly, they encountered what amounts to a
determined resistance on the part of the artists themselves -- buoyed this
time by the universal access to the Web and artists' ability to create their
own websites, and therefore online connections to the market of ideas and
images.
So many artists do not want to let go of this vital century-old
understanding: that Abstraction in Art constitutes another universal
language, flexible enough to encompass emotions and geometry, universal
aspirations and the lyrical poetry of the everyday -- that and everything in
between. I, for one, am concentrating on the corner of this universe that is
expressed through color and the impression of touchable texture, mixed
with the kinetic vocabulary of intervals. I speak several entwined abstract
languages -- and my range of expression is an evolving and enchanted
encounter with this ever expanding ecosystem of embraced echolocations...
Installation shot: at the Vernissage.
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