Mark Schlesinger at Finesilver

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by Raphael Rubinstein

In 1999, after many years in New York City, abstract painter Mark Schlesinger moved to San Antonio. Not surprisingly, this dramatic change of address has been accompanied by a significant change in his art, as revealed by this exhibition of recent work.

Prior to leaving New York, Schlesinger was making brightly colored, delicately impastoed paintings that combined rectilinear geometry and biomorphic forms. in the new work, rectilinearity has won the day, as Schlesinger has forsaken, at least for now, the blobby shapes and arcing or wavy lines that were such an essential part of his pre-Texas paintings. Noteworthy as this formal shift may be, it is perhaps less striking than the artist's change in process. Abandoning the paintbrush, Schlesinger is now creating his paintings by casting thin layers of acrylic paint directly onto canvases or plastic panels. The artist uses masking tape and cardboard to construct a mold on a ground that has been prepared with clear medium applied with a roller. Into this mold he pours several layers of thick paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. The result is a raised shape of a density running from translucent to opaque. In some of the paintings with plastic-panel supports--these panels also possess varying degrees of translucency--Schlesinger fashions partly open boxlike structures in order to allow light to filter through from the back of the painting.

A typical example of the new work is Boo Berry, one of the 14 paintings on view at Finesilver. Measuring 24 by 30 inches--with a few exceptions, this show contained mostly smaller-scaled work--the painting is dominated by a centrally placed blue-violet rectangular form that appears to have been laid, blanketlike, over the pale yellow-to-violet ground of gridded squares and rectangles. Tactility has always been central to Schlesinger, but now he has found a way to emphasize it while sidestepping the issue of touch. The blue-violet rectangle in Boo Berry, like the cast rectangles, squares and lines in the other paintings, is so literal, so thinglike, that it draws the work toward the realms of sculpture and architecture. But Schlesinger is as much a colorist as he ever was, if preferring more muted, closer-valued hues and what is for him an unprecedented luminosity. I suspect that these qualities may have as much to do with the artist's frequent visits to the Judds and Flavins on view in Marfa as with any influence of Texas light and landscape. Whatever the ingredients, these are rewarding paintings by an artist unafraid of traveling to new places.