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slightly unsettling images. Stern has been exploring urban experience for
several years (along with a continuing series of portrait heads and full–
length figures), in densely loaded, sensuously stroked pictures that seem
to fluctuate between acute perception and whole-hearted abstraction,
without compromising either. Confronting one of Stern's large figure
groups is like glimpsing something out of the corner of your eye or half–
seeing someone who jostles you as he rushes past, but it is also like being
forced to consider the essential nature of painting itself. Stern's urgently
worked surfaces appear to have gathered themselves together long enough
to suggest a fleeting observation, before subsiding into being the raw
materials of painting once again. Conversely, the logic of a play of appar–
ently improvisatory light and dark patches or the orchestration of sub–
dued , unnameable hues lit by flickering brights, turns out to be linked to
the structural logic of a crowded street or a gathering around a table.
Stern's drawings similarly tread the boundary between pure mark-making
and perception.
Stern's newest work, seen at Rosenberg and Kaufman, in two loca–
tions-paintings in their Soho gallery and drawings on 57th Street-gave
new meaning to the phrase "Subway Series" with their suggestion of her–
metic interiors populated by crowds of figures, some ganged together on
seats, others apparently about to step beyond the confines of the canvas,
the whole animated by rapid, overscaled gestures that implied that his
protagonists were in motion.
If
it sounds artful or tricky, think again.
Like all of Stern's work, these were deeply felt, intelligent pictures driven
in equal measure by the painter'S passionate belief in the expressive
potency of his medium and his alertness to the day-to-day experience of
being a particular individual in a particular place-domestic baggage,
casual encounters, the dislocation of being (like Nickson) a transplanted
European, and all the rest of it.
In
his best work, out of an unlikely com–
bination of transient imagery and assertive materiality, Stern constructs
pictures that embody not only his distance, as an observer, from the quo–
tidian, but also his participation in his adopted city.
Like Stern, the Polish-born painter Wlodzimierz Ksiazek (who has
been a u.S. resident since
1988)
deals with private notions of displace–
ment, the grittiness of modern life, and the physical presentness of paint;
like Golub, Ksiazek is an angry painter who gives vent to firmly held
beliefs about social injustice and the iniquities of recent history. Unlike
either of his colleagues, he is a wholly abstract artist, relying on
painterly strategies and processes as carriers for his deepest feelings and
most intense convictions.
