There is a softness to the hard edges of Jonathan Perlowsky?s art. This show featured some older works on paper, canvas, and wood? Most from the 1970s and nine new paintings from 2012 and 2013. In the recent pieces, the Connecticut-based artist sprayed acrylic and tinted piano lacquer onto sheets of birchwood to produce subtle gradations of seemingly self-illuminated color.
In Ophelia, the results are light as a feather, with the wood?s visible grain holding its own as a panel of equal interest and value to the painted stripes. That equanimity of paint and wood grain was carried through four large diptychs on birch, all from 2013. In these works, Perlowsky applied pigment to only one of the two panels, leaving the second panel as pure wood that offered a textural, organic foil to the vibrant colors on the other side. He also achieved a surprising level of luminescence by mixing the pigments with metallic powder from the turn of the 20th century that he discovered in a warehouse some 40 years ago.
In Ghosts and Divinity, flickers of light emanate from within the paint. And the slashes of orange and gold in Valentine's Day coalesce like lava dripping over a flame. In The Cimmerian Legend of Baby Blue, Perlowsky applied some of the painted lines with a triple-zero brush; the result is extremely subtle and delicate, as though the "lives dissipate practically into nothingness," in the words of the artist. In all of his work, the tension between random gestural forms and studied, meticulous lines creates a dramatic dialogue between hard-edge and freeform. Indeed, the artist has said in an interview that he prefers to guide the color into the spaces it wants to go with drips that are both controlled and surprising.