Barrie Karp / John DuchBarrie Karp's imagery enshrines obviously female shapes and symbols into lustrous backgrounds of color fields awash in tonal accompaniments. Her bright surfaces of flat, intersecting planes juxtaposed with fiery, coarse sections, set up the iconization of her female symbols like altar pieces. There's also a cathedral-like sound of reverberating calmness about them. She has tremendous mastery of color and the power to combine the appropriate shades to evoke the entire range of emotional reaction—from brooding pensiveness to the cool revelation of stark nakedness. John Duch's work recalls the action painters but Duch distinguishes his work by appropriating certain techniques and effects to create his own emotional impact. His surfaces are worked to the maximum with paint scraped and layered in the cadenzas of activity yet the jazz-like fervor is contained with a sobering sense of composition and no part is ever lost control of. He returns that sense of the dramatic and grand pioneered in those earlier canvases and restores the heroic concept of "further," a place to aspire to. Beauty is attained through his muscled control of the raw, volcanic ingredients and his gentle compositional integration's. The canvases are windows into emotional landscapes that forge the brutal with the refined. (press release) |