Art/ Scott Grodesky

Scott Grodesky
Baumgartner Gallery NYC May 2007


Looking at the mostly large-scale paintings on canvas by Scott Grodesky at Baumgartner Gallery in Chelsea I am reminded of the charm, colorations and narrative power of Florentine school painting of the 14th century. Not that Mr. Grodesky's subject matter refers to anything but the immediate here and now: "Earthquake" (2006) and "Redevelopment" (2007) are parables of compromised life in New York City Now. Furthermore the paintings express the kind of serious anxiety about the future that the Florentine paintings, in their time, were meant to allay by showing the saint-in-action.

An overall quietness is achieved by the painting technique itself. All of the works are of thinly washed acrylic colors that stay for the most part within their penciled outlines and appear to have had their materiality almost literally, but certainly figuratively, blotted out. There is no real painterliness in a modern sense; the physical surface is flat and feels especially dry, fragile. Each work employs multiple perspectives, scale that seems, most often, to indicate importance and repetition of subject within the same image to give an idea of duration and futurity.

"Red Chair" (2005) would seem to be the least apocalyptic of the larger works. In it a mother and child are pictured twice in ascending scale as if rotating clockwise. In front, at the bottom of the picture plane, we are looking up into the mother's undescribed, shadowed face; she is looking down, but not, as it turns out, at the child. The child is looking over the mother's shoulder, perhaps at its own more defined face in the second, much larger depiction of these two figures that appears, as it were, behind them, but now seen from behind and above. In this instantiation the child is looking out, not exactly at us, and the mother is looking through a doorway that leads deeper into the picture, to the next room where we can see only the corner of a wildly over-scaled lapis blue table in an otherwise black outer-space background. To make this vision of the future even more ominous the blue table corner is rendered as airy negative space to the black defining slice of "background" visible through the doorway. The domestic scene is finished with a partly dark standing lamp; cluttered bookcase and loose pages hanging from the walls that more resemble IV drip bags. All the colors are somewhat pastel if nonetheless bright, the way thinned paint always allows more light to reflect off the white-primed surface, causing the colors to glow a little un-naturally, speak a little more strongly.

These are powerful works that are as insistent as their edges are clean. They speak to our many and often conflicting concerns about surviving physically, emotionally and spiritually in a world where our own interests often seem to contradict themselves.