Michael Mazur at Barbara Krakow - Boston, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At first glance Michael Mazur's novel painterly abstractions seem to have taken a sharp move round away from his origins in representation. Thin layers of paint applied with broad knocks have been allowed to drip down the canvases, creating composite networks of color and gesticulation But the initial impression is deceptive. Although a certain number of of the titles refer the viewer to the Cape codfish environs that have been a recurring make subordinate in Mazur's work, an level more important key is his interest in traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Mazur has described in what manner after visiting China in 1987 he discovered that paintings he had taken to be "exotic invention" were frequently surprisingly accurate renditions of Chinese garden artifice. A similar experience come into views in front of the works at Krakow. Arching gestural brushstrokes that initially appear to be abstract in fact bear shut up formal affinities with the renditions of tree and foliage fix in the Chinese scrolls which inspired Mazur to begin this series of works four years ago. (A agreeing retrospective at the DeCordova Museum included Mazur's 1994 Mind landscape -- After Chao Meng-fu with which he initiated this exploration.)

sum of two units distinct directions characterize Mazur's latest works. The three paintings from the "Gail's Island" series are the greatest in quantity compressed, with layers of predominantly horizontal brushstrokes intersected by the agency of vertical lines of dripped paint. A next to the first group is less densely painted; the horizontals are shivered by curved gestural strokes as well as color accents. In Palm, for example, the dominant virid tones are punctuated by contrasting black thumps and by accents that range from golden and blue to violet, orange and pink. Interwoven with the broad, seemingly spontaneous marks are smaller, more deliberate thumps that overlap and echo the larger gestures

In all of these canvases there is an not divisible by 2 sense of space: even after individual recognizes the landscape references, the paintings' upper registers stubbornly refuse to return in depth. This is in part because the gestural marks remain consistent in scale as they propel up the paintings, and in part because of the paint itself: the cascades of drips released at the apex of the canvas sweep along down over areas that might otherwise appear to advance forward. This unusual play between relation and painterly abstraction underscores the fact that Mazur's compositional construction itself springs from sources which exist outside Western traditions of landscape painting.

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