Mark Schlesinger: westfalischer kunstverein

The straightforward-sounding title of this exhibit "Paintings 1993-2003 New York--Texas," move rounds out to represent a rather surprising journey. Mark Schlesinger was born in novel York in 1949, making him part of an age-cohort of painters that includes Ros Bleckner and Jonathan Lasker, and like them he unraveled a mannerist revision of modernist abstraction. on the contrary at the undoubtedly significant age of fifty, Schlesinger left of recent origin York for San Antonio. Not with equal reason surprisingly, this seems to have caused a deep transformation in his work--or perhaps it was that the push toward such a transformation alerted the move.

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on the contrary not necessarily the sort of transformation individual would have expected; the city slicker did not become a faux hayseed. Indeed, if urban life is characterized by the agency of artifice and rationalization, then the paintings Schlesinger has produc since his put in motion to Texas are considerably more urban in sensibility than those he made while living in fresh York. If nothing else, the earlier work was execut in oil upon canvas with evident artisanal skill, while the novel work is wildly experimental in its use of vernacular materials. And where the fresh York paintings are based upon forms whose elegant arabesques inevitably imply a stylization of natural forms, the grid-based arrangements of the Texas work indicate referent in the realm of culture--notably, architecture and industry.

a certain number of of the new pieces advise the influence of Donald Judd whose work Schlesinger has now had considerable opportunity to inquiry in situ at Marfa. Like Judd Schlesinger is dealing with color that is, as David Batchelor one time put it, "sharp, hard and live, in a vulgar kind of way." Judd got a fate of mileage, for instance, on the outside of what happens to light when you gaze at a sheet of Plexiglas at its edge; in paintings like Dee Lighted, 2003 Schlesinger elicits the of the soul electric hues that emerge when acrylic paint forms an cutting side on a Plexiglas surface. plane sharper, harder, and more vulgar is what happens when Schlesinger wraps his painting support, whether timber-land panel or Styrofoam, in glistening sheets of transparent colored vinyl, as in Cherry Cherry, 2003 and Juicy Jellies, 2003 Here, as in the paintings upon Plexiglas, acrylic is applied to the two sides of the vinyl surface, giving a true compressed but vividly physical faculty of perception of spatial differentiation and above all creating strange and highly specific color events that could arise only from one side the conjunction of these particular materials.

There are softer more traditionally atmospheric kinds of experience upon offer in Schlesinger's recent work as well--particularly in those pieces in which unstretched canvas has been stiffened from one side being impregnated with acrylic, creating strangely warped surfaces that float freely before the wall (R Rovin', 2003 sky-colored Jean Baby, 2003). And for all the brilliant, almost kitschy cosmopolitan vividness of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Schlesinger's new work, a protracted engagement with it suggests that the Texas landscape may have put forthed a deeper influence than was at first apparent. These paintings engage a different faculty of perception of space than was available in novel York. From nearby they appear as materially at hand and spatially up-front, but with a certain distance the intense or mut colors float unrestrained of their physical support and create an optical space of great breadth: pop you're out in the wild sunset.

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