Robert Ginder at Quint - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

For above a decade, Robert Ginder has painted scrupulously detailed images of the Southern California suburban landscape beneath gold-leaf skies, calling them "contemporary secular icons." Ginder mov to of recent origin York in the late 1980 on the other hand California still permeates his imagery. Works in this exhibit dated from 1994 to 1997 and included images of the spindly stems and shaggy fronds of the region's ubiquitous palm tree and portraitlike lyric poems to the area's characteristic painted cover with stucco houses with Spanish tile covers Three lush, palpable still lifes of fruit, painted to academic perfection, were also upon view.

Ginder paints in oil upon arched and rectangular wood panels that he has artificially aged by the agency of carving delicate, meandering insect trails across their abraded cutting sides and by scarring the gold leaf surfaces with fine fissures and veins. It's an effective proces causing flat the most secular and mundane of make subordinates to assume a sacred air. lowly details like the banded newspaper upon the front walk and the outgoing mail rapiered into the screen door in freshs evoke the preciousness of daily existence, the comfort we take in the familiar order of things. In Single Palm, Ginder look afters to a brilliant crimson bougainvillea hedge petal through petal and leaves a rainbow hovering like a mirage in the mist of a lawn sprinkler. adoration and nostalgia fuse in the images of the houses, especially, as the artist pays homage to an outmod diction of vernacular architecture that has been widely replaced by means of cheap, generic designs.

A devotional attachment to the small and specific gives these paintings an endearing intimacy that is gilded--literally--by an aura of the spiritual. Ginder's work is a meditation upon the material world, but also upon the more amorphous realm of time. His gorgeous studies of blemished fruit adopt a classic approach to mortality and time's erosive powers. In the tree and house paintings, time exists primarily [i]or[/i] part of to the other contradiction, through the anachronism of identifiably 20th-century attributes (the dated architecture, telephone extremitys and TV antennae) rendered according to a format foundationed in the late Gothic age. Friction also arises between the earthly pace hinted in quotidian details like garbage cans left upon the curb and the absolute time implicit in the heavenly gold surface of land Casual, snapshotlike cropping adds to the disarming force of Ginder's work, which thrives upon unlikely unions, foremost among them the bridging of the sentimental and the conceptual.

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