Link to Post:
http://thought-form.net/?p=65
Kim Sloane reviews two concurrent exhibitions of work by painter Paul Resika: 8 Paintings from 8 Decades at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through February 10) and Eight Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York (through February 9).
Sloane writes that Resika's "relationship with the world of appearances shifts, sometimes closer, sometimes attenuated past immediate recognition, but he is always in this world of abstraction and language. This is what, I suspect, he looks for in the museums and galleries; how this abstract language, learned with Hoffman, is found in the art of all ages. The effect, or power, of this abstraction, this mastery of the language, is that every part of the painting is elevated to a symbol. Every element lives as both itself, as paint, and as metaphor. The disc can be a vibrant red circle, placed on the picture plane amongst other forms, alive as a participant in the choreography of composition, but it is also seen is also the sign of a setting sun. What is being examined, what Resika has long contemplated, is the nature of abstraction, and conversely, the abstraction of nature. For the artist it is the many ways visual rhymes can be wrought that makes the correspondence."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/63350/the-last-of-the-true-believers/
Thomas Micchelli writes about Paul Resika on the occasion of two concurrent shows: Resika: 8 + 8, 8 Paintings from 8 Decades at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through Feb 10) and Resika: 8 + 8, Eight Recent Works at Lori Bookstein Fine Art (through Feb 9).
Micchelli recals that as a student Resika taught him that "it is better to think of [past masters], from whatever century or continent, as tribal ancestors who may or may not approve of what you’re doing, but who would understand your struggles and failures because their experiences mirrored yours... Resika was trying to tell us: that familiarity would break down our preconceptions and cultivate a fertile relationship with the history of our art form... [He] is among the last of the true believers. He committed himself to painting before the idea of making a picture became clouded by irony, distancing and recycling. He had nothing but his talent and his passion, which he followed with an extreme single-mindedness, brooking no doubt about painting’s purpose and efficacy."
Link to Post:
http://www.studiomatters.com/painting/paul-resika-at-lori-bookstein
Maureen Mullarkey blogs about the exhibition Paul Resika: Flowers on view through August 5, 2011 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York. "a survey of atypical floral still lifes that begins in the late 1980s and continues into the present. A dozen small scale... arrangements illustrate his coloristic verve, an inheritance from his youthful study under Hans Hofmann."
