If one may begin with yet another music analog, the tactile oils of Eric Svitic can be compared to the solos of John Coltrane for their sonorous, somber, tonalities and brooding beauty. Svitic's rugged, earthy faces, sometimes scored with wound-like lines or graphic elements resembling roughly scrawled graffiti, resonate in the viewers' subconscious, often evoking a sense of existential angst.

“Conformity and acceptance versus primal instinct and violence are all concepts that place human beings in a constant state of dementia and derangement,” Svitic asserts in an artist statement, and he makes those tensions physically palpable in the pigments, as well as in the elegant funkiness of his forms. The sense of psychological unrest made manifest in material presence in explicit in both the title and the mood of the painting Svitic calls “The Internal Vortex.” Here, violently brushed reddish brown and olive green hues--colors like those in infantry fatigues, whether the artist intended that association or not!—are combined with sinister black drips and bold circular scrawls that appear to have been emphatically scratched into the thickly impastoed surface at the center of the composition with a sharp object.

Even at their most abstract (for, although they are not on view here, Svitic also creates sexually charged figurative compositions), these paintings are invariable allusive, as seen in another powerful work called “Evolution of the Vortex,” where scrawled fragments of language, partially obscured by opaque and semitransparent saturations and characteristically dark oil colorations, add a semiotic element to the composition.

Like Antoni Tapies, the modern Spanish master of Tachism—or “art Informel”—Eric Svitic has a paradoxical ability to make surfaces as emphatically material as ancient ravaged walls suggest a host of subtle metaphysical meanings. Indeed, like the other two painters in this show, Svitic demonstrates conclusively that while atistic fashions may come and go, abstract paintings will remain a rich, varied, and valuable enterprise as long as there are gifted artists who wish to probe beyond the surface of recognizable reality.

 

--Ed McCormack

GALLERY&STUDIO 15