Stephen Curry at quint contemporary art - San Diego - Brief Article

Since Stephen Curry made his debut nearly a decade ago, he has proven himself to be a traditionalist. In his paintings of fruit, vegetables, animals and trees, he mirrors nature with the sort of stylistic finesse that makes it radiantly present and poetic.

Curry's recent exhibition highlighted his passion for color, here freshened by a newly lustrous surface that gives his paintings a jewel-like quality without making them look fussy or precious. Fragments of trees glitter darkly. The territory around them is a space for rich layers of red in Shudder, with long vertical drips streaming toward the bottom of the picture. In Cringe and Heed, slender networks of trunks and branches are surrounded with icy blues that lend the paintings an aura of twilight fantasy.

The human figure is never literally part of Curry's pictures, but it is a sort of phantom presence in the shape of the trunk and branches in Shudder, and in the stem and leaves of the robust flower in Shun. These works employ anthropomorphism of the most subtle sort, which some viewers might miss and others may register only subliminally.

Curry's titles, in these paintings, are associative, referring more to the pensive, darkly lyrical quality of his work overall than to the specific content of any particular image. In earlier paintings by Curry, the imagery often feels elegiac, with mortality the unspoken subject, but in these new works the tone is less brooding. In spirit, his art reveals a kinship to that visionary strain in American landscape that runs from Ryder to Dove, O'Keeffe and Hartley.

Also included in Curry's show was a set of smaller, high-keyed abstract panels, each devoted to a single color. These monochromes were seductive, their surfaces smooth and shimmering. There were examples in pale and deep green, fiery oranges and reds. More than most monochrome paintings, these insist on connections to the palette of nature--ice and fire, earth and water. In a sense, they are the visual equivalent of tone poems. Curry's foray into abstraction has an elegant sort of logic to it, taking one back to his figurative paintings with a heightened appreciation of their many virtues.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group