John Goodrich reviews a recent exhibition of paintings by Kyle Staver at Kent Fine Art, New York.

Goodrich writes: “Kyle Staver is a colorist, and one of the best around – which is only to say that in her paintings she makes every color count. In art school, they drill into students the three properties of color – hue, tone, intensity – but it’s impossible to teach what truly characterizes a color, which is its compositional weight, the way it shifts and leverages other colors. In Staver’s recent paintings at Kent Fine Art, we see human figures rescuing, battling, or simply consorting with one another in mythological and religious scenes, but the key to Staver’s exuberant storytelling lies not in the literary, but in the pictorial – in the way colors give resonance to the delight of an arcing or sinking body, or the glint on light-tinged hair, or the rounding of a thigh, whether belonging to woman, man or beast.”