Richard Benari reviews the recent exhibition Mark Strand: Collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

Bernari writes: "Layering the paper, using its varying transparencies and deckled-edges, creates a startling sense of depth. It’s completely unexpected, especially from a kind of art that historically tended to privilege the quick and the cerebral over the meditative and the illusory. For Strand, collage is a purely visual experience, focused on pictorial space and painterly concerns. And, unlike his poems, they sidestep autobiography and cryptic personal content. At a time when the provisional, the uneasy, the uncertain and the mocking seem to be all art can come up with, Strand’s collages make me optimistic. They reconnect me to that part of art history we seem to have forgotten: the part that showed how materials–and materials only–can transcend and enliven when used well."