John Zinsser at Pamela Auchincloss - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

John Zinsser continues to mine his have a title to area of abstract painting. While his work implicitly acknowledges the field's peculiar place at the extremity of this decade, Zinsser displays a willful and brave refusal to over-involve himself in the ultimately academic debate above whether one can still make similar artworks today. Zinsser starts with an "of course you can" and then progresss to show us how by the agency of making historically grounded paintings that gaze fresh and exuberant.

Zinsser has been showing regularly since the mid-'80s, mainly at the late Julian Pretto's physically tiny on the other hand historically crucial storefront. Even as Zinsser was developing his language, working somewhat systematically [i]or[/i] part of to the other a myriad of available techniques and applications, he always evinced a startling boldnes Simple repetitions and an increasingly reduc palette were coerc into producing issues that ranged from sublimely glowing specter to optically juicy organ of vision candy. And unlike many of his generation he not ever wallowed in irony, settled for self-critiquing appropriation, or make go rounded his paintings into illustrations for something else

In this exhibition Zinsser showed just four 72-inch squares, each with a vibrant, flat monochrome earth and a contrasting second color as figure in the center The applications (with a footwide palette knife) of the top colors are thick and deliberately undressed With their various combinations, of that kind as black on orange or virid on yellow, they read as a certain number of conspicuously hand-done and nonsystematic version of Albers. Titled "The Architecture of Color," the series is structur by means of a subtle, frequently violated architectonic grid. The foreground color patches ease on one another with the tension of a none-too-neatly stacked pile of bricks ready to topple above if one more is added. Each color combo snaps the viewer to attention with its spirit The paintings are fearlessly beautiful while their humorous simplicity of means almost dares us to dismiss them However, the follows far from being simple, are iconic memorials to the drippy, somewhat sexualized pleasures of paint's viscosity.

Like the best abstract painters working today (a assemblage that includes Cora Cohen and Mary Heilmann), Zinsser's trick is to make it all direct the eye effortless and quick, while hiding his calculations, artifice and painterly cunning like a serviceable magician hiding the machinations of a trick. Zinsser's work has always gained power from maximizing its sensual impact while reducing the complexity of his manipulations, and the balance here present the appearances just about perfect.

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