Paul Resika at Salander-O'Reilly - New York - Brief Article

After studying with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown during the early '50s, Paul Resika traced his developmental influences back through Bonnard and Cezanne, to the old master of 19th-century French pictorialism--Corot. During the mid-'50s, perhaps emulating Corot's travels to Rome, Resika lived in Venice to study Italian painting. The opulently brushed surfaces of Titian and especially Giorgione had a lasting influence on him. The result was updated symbolist landscape painting, modest in scale and, in the manner of the Nabis, highly efficient. Resika's daring color has lifted his work above the terrain of naturalism. His development recalls that of Hofmann's best students; I am reminded of the work of Robert de Niro, Sr., which drew from similar sources and worked out its own elegant synthesis.

With Resika's new work, however, the influence of Hofmann fully surfaces; flat, broad planes of color deployed in constructivist fashion, shallow space structured in careful concert with the edges and corners of the canvases, the sparse use of gestural lines--all recall the late high-modernist style of his teacher. Resika does not hand himself over to "pure" abstraction. He finds his motifs among painting's commonplaces, and I mean this in the best sense: boats and their reflections, a sun low over the horizon, the occasional boathouse or harborside warehouse. From Canaletto to Dufy--there are traces of both in Resika's recent work--such subject matter has provided painters with more than enough opportunity for invention.

Floating (2000), a modest 20 by 24 inches, is a carefully modulated study in light and scale. On a warmly underpainted field of cobalt blue, Resika floats a barge composed of gray and white volumetric forms. Another modest work, Verona (2000), features centrally placed curving volumes--presumably boats, though they also suggest still lifes with fruit or toys. The scale of these pictures recalls Morandi, while the cinnabar-and-green and sienna-and-pink melon shapes in Verona suggest, strangely enough, late Guston. Another work, Slate (1999-2000), with its improvisational black, green, orange and gray brushwork, is also fairly modest in size but seems as grandly scaled and as informally executed as much of Hofmann's late work. With the larger pictures, Red Pompeii (1999-2000, 64 by 51 inches) and China (2000, 51 by 38 inches), Resika has reduced his forms to a few semicircular shapes in facile shorthand--one thinks of Jean Helion--and placed them on broad, richly modulated color fields.

With his recent work, Resika has achieved a sheer visual opulence that, moving beyond modernism, combines a spectrum of influences ranging from "aristocratic" traditional Italian painting to French Informel painting of the '50s. Some of these pictures even reminded me of Georges Mathieu. What Resika achieves should be of interest to a generation of younger painters who produce "hybrid" works derived from a variety of often unlikely sources. [An exhibition of etchings and monotypes was on view Sept. 28 to Nov. 3 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.]

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