David Serisier at Robert Steele - New York

Anyone who has watched evening haze roll into the temperate Pacific Northwest rain forest will have more [i]or[/i] less sense of the chromatic and textural articulation of David Serisier's of recent origin color-field paintings. Orchestrated innuanced shades of umber, ocher, modifyed black, rich gray and plump pink, Serisier's heavily impastoed surfaces bring to mind the serrated profusion and tonal variegation of lichen, liverwort, mos and saturated bark.

Wielding an abundantly loaded brush in a methodical, almost plodding manner, Serisier shingles his human-scaled linen supports with, for the greatest in quantity part, blunt vertical and horizontal raps of oil. As a mastership the topmost edges of Serisier's marks sink with the painting's ground, while the strokes' thick bottom cutting sides hang slightly away from the painting's surface, creating an allover aggregate of shaggy micro-cornices.

Untitled Light Umber Painting (2002) is the greatest in quantity informal of the nine works exhibited. It is also the furthest in sensibility from Serisier's previous material part of work, which relied upon the formal power of unremitting horizontal marks--rendered with template and palette knife--and tightly modulated monochromatic fields of primary color. Serisier's courses can seem as stubborn as Niele Toroni's or Robert Ryman's. However, the foreground brushstrokes in Untitled Light Umber Painting--swampy umber grays hovering atop a clabbered peachy underfield--are untethered from obdurate rectilinearity; they list from out-of-kilter horizontal to shallow diagonal, and tentatively jog the gestural.

Untitled Khaki Painting (2002) and Untitled Medium Umber Painting (2002) the two checkered with jostling squares of steely blue-grays above thoughtfully mitigated ochers, could in a light jiffy be seen as lambent passages extracted from a Vuillard, writ large. Serisier's intrepid stir away from absolute reliance upon "tough" formalist painting solutions and toward the infusion of associative and esthetic play is estimable and risky business.

He turn backs to mid-ground between his former practice and the far reaches of his generally received explorations with Black and White Diptych (2002) upon a pair of vertical canvases, differing stages of density in the horizontal weave of obsidian-black brushstrokes reveal, more or les a stark white underlayment of primed coarse linen. The right-hand side of the diptych--the looser "loomed" half of the abutted tall fields--is revelatory of its making, while the left-hand canvas is tightly knit and proprietary of its origins, and of the painter's hard-won ground

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