Painting as Decoration, Agitation or Just a Futile Expression

San Francisco Chronicle

Saturday, June 18, 2005

by Kenneth Baker

Zurier at Anglim: A profession of faith seems to lie at the heart of Bay Area painter John Zurier's recent work at Paule Anglim. Certainly not religious faith, but something more in the line of an anti-heroic existentialism.

Zurier's work exhales a full acceptance of the futility of painting in the 21st century. He responds to this situation not with yawps of protest, lament or frustration, but with whispering assertions of the memory and potentiality instinct in the materials of his art, thanks to its long history. Even abstraction now has nearly a century behind it.

Zurier's work will take those willing to go there inside the focal distance from which paintings customarily appear resolved, into a zone known mostly to painters.

There the tooth of the canvas, the viscosity of paint and the payload of even the faintest brush marks show their potential for generating content.

Proof lies in "Glittering Dust" (2004), a brown over blue painting in which a mere dusting of yellow in the canvas warp is enough to evoke James McNeill Whistler's celebrated "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" (1875). Not the particular allusion but its startling, uncontrived availability makes Zurier's point about the condition in which he works.

Several paintings, "Arabella" (2005) most emphatically, pay homage to Barnett Newman (1905-1970), relying on broad vertical divisions of the surface.

Newman allowed for seepage of paint under the tape with which he masked areas, as Zurier does in "Arabella." But Zurier's pallid, tattered red-on-aqua field connotes a reluctance or incapacity to adopt Newman's foursquare, heroic mode of address to the viewer. Nothing compels that sort of conviction anymore besides the painter's own uncertainly shareable values. Zurier's paintings are banners of that uncertainty.

The Romantic temper burns on in Zurier's art, but faintly, almost starved of the oxygen of anticipated response.

Zurier's Quiet Brush Lets Light and Fabric do the Talking

San Francisco Chronicle

Saturday, October 25, 2003

by Kenneth Baker

The lore of Abstract Expressionism puts confrontation with blank canvas at the center of the creative process. It also locates the authenticity of such encounters in the past.

Bay Area painter John Zurier gives it currency again in new work at Paule Anglim, not by raising the gestural pitch of his painting but by quieting it down.

Action Painting legend evokes the empty canvas as a featureless desert of expressive potential awaiting someone to make it bloom. Zurier looks for promptings not in the broad emptiness of blank canvas but in the fullness of its physical detail.

Some years ago he discovered a brand of pre-primed, pre-stretched canvas made in Russia. In contrast to the undyed Belgian linen many painters sensitive to nuance prefer, the Russian canvas comes rough in texture, irregular in its weave and seemingly dipped in glaring white primer. In "Oblaka (For P.W.)" (2003), the fabric looks rough as burlap.

That level of detail will sometimes suggest a rhythm of handwork or a change of material inflection, though knowing this does not guarantee that a viewer will be able to retrace Zurier's process: As often as not, he covers his tracks.

When he puts a fine diagonal line across a thinly painted field in "Oblaka MAZ" (2003), we wonder whether it might record a now-submerged ridge in the fabric or a momentary streak of reflected light that might have fallen on it while he worked. Perhaps he simply thought the featureless field needed something to bind it, like a tent that wants roping against wind.

Strikingly, even where Zurier's brushwork is most agitated, as in "Oblaka 80" (2003), "French 3" (2003) or "Oblaka (Green)" (2002), it never gives the impression of being about him.

For all their subtlety and emptiness of invented forms, Zurier's paintings sustain a striking objectivity, a sense of prizing investigation over expression. For proof, look at the paintings around midday and then again near gallery closing time. In their responsiveness to light they seem to make the surrounding reality bear witness to their existence, independent of the painter's intentions.

Most of the work on view extends a series titled "Oblaka," the Russian word for "cloud." That title, like Zurier's preference for ready-made Russian canvases, makes cryptic acknowledgment of his Russian ancestry.

The emotional quality of Zurier's paintings arises from their almost abject dependence on the viewer's assent. Most of their nuances declare themselves so faintly that the paintings can simply recede into artistic nonentity before impatient or uneducated eyes.

The considered placement of paintings on the walls and an unusually low eye line make this vulnerability to dismissal felt very clearly. The phrasing of the exhibition as a whole serves as a clue that one by one the paintings are not as vacant or elusive as they appear at first.