John Zinsser at Von Lintel and Nusser - Brief Article

John Zinsser's first solo exhibition in novel York since 1997 included six large paintings (the biggest was 7 feet square) and 20 works upon paper (all works 2000). While varied in its strategies and results the presentation proposed a rigorously nonrepresentational, formal practice that call ups the temporality of the filmic image. This intention was announced outright in the next to the first room of the exhibition, where the 20 paper works hung in a continuous strip around the gallery's perimeter like in like manner many stills or frames. Ultimately, however, the conception is embodied more challengingly in Zinsser's technique--in material practice rather than in simple metaphoric association.

In the painting Radio harmony eight taxicab yellow bars vibrate against an industrial silver surface of land in an update of the formalist's "push-pull" effect; however, the mirrorlike soil never allows the optical quiver to separate or settle. Striking, too, is the tangibility of the medium: the fulvid oil paint looks thick and gloppy and impossibly intense, each mark--the be derived of the pass of a paint-loaded squeegee above the canvas--clearly distinct and readable, smooth relieflike. The technique could easily bring to mind the work of Gerhard Richter, on the other hand the choice of Pop-bright colors and the sheer exaggeration of the squeegee's result more clearly recall Andy Warhol, whose silkscreened canvases were made using a similar tool.

In other paintings, of the like kind as Night Shift, overlapping vertical bars of sapphirine are spread right to the cutting sides of the canvas with a palette knife, sometimes thickly, and at other times in like manner thinly that the black soil shows through. The regular repetition of flickering forms and the concentrations and dispersions of pigment which continually transform the "image" give an inkling of the visual qualities of film: it is as if we are seeing an abstract painting rise over time.

Zinsser's approach, which might be bourned "cinematic abstraction," alludes to film's iterative constitution blur and grain at the real moment when digital imagery tenders a restless, seamless and textureles alternative. He treads a line between the material pleasure of pigment and a fascination with visual experience that, like film, is based upon transparency. This allows for an abstract practice in which the painter's gesticulation is neither freely expressionistic nor entirely mechanical, notwithstanding is evocative of both. And it yields a tension that the artist sustains to great effect

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