Glittering gardens: in his paintings on antique Japanese screens and sliding doors, veteran Pattern and Decoration artist Robert Kushner brings a high degree of opulence to a melange of Eastern and Western influences

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Edward M. Gomez

Kushner has also devised compositional techniques that combine an aleatory approach with more premeditated decisions. This might result, for example, in a clustering of elements near the bottom of a painting--an arrangement found in works in which some of the plants, such as tall grasses or the long-stemmed flowers in Delphinium Sentinel (2004), rise vertically into the space above. One also finds a palindromic organization in works like Tulip Accumulation (2004), where rows of flowers read the same way from left to right or from right to left.

Employing devices such as these and tapping his arsenal of East Asian sources, Kushner has made very large works, such as the mural-size, eight-canvas-panel Island Garden (2004), and others that are relatively quiet and austere, such as Iris Waltz (2003). Island Garden, a work commissioned for the dining room of an art-collecting couple's home, measures 41 feet in length and wraps around the room's four walls. Depicting more than a dozen kinds of flowers, it features protruding branches, outline drawings and more modeled, fully colored blooms set against alternating grids of gold and copper leaf. Patches of oxidization on the copper leaf appear as light washes of turquoise that seem to float above their metallic surface; they reinforce the sense of depth--of multiple picture planes--created by Kushner's free-floating floral elements.

Besides the paintings, Kushner has created (collaborating with the mosaicist Stephen Miotto) a large subway project, Four Seasons Seasoned (2004), in glass, tile and marble, for the 77th Street station on the Lexington Avenue line in Manhattan. (5) The mosaics depict a selection of flowers that evoke all four seasons, a familiar theme in Japanese art. Each section of the grand, two-part project--one mosaic for the uptown side and another for the downtown platform--features centralized, heraldic flowers (a sunflower in one, a peony in the other) surrounded by other specimens like tulips and lilacs for spring, roses and daisies for summer, red maple leaves and chrysanthemums for autumn, and holly and red berries for winter. Placed high up in the relatively low-ceilinged subway station, set into broad expanses of wall just above the turnstiles and, thus, above the heads of entering and exiting passengers, the murals, with their white and metallic-flecked surfaces, glisten and reflect the limited artificial light that is available in their underground settings (the station's lighting is plain and institutional at best). Kushner's mosaics are more understated than spectacular, yet they have brought a dash of splendor to an otherwise drab site. He describes his enthusiasm for such projects as a reflection of his "old-fashioned modernist's" idealism. "I really believe the public deserves something beautiful," he says, "and that people know when they're seeing something visually satisfying, and that it enhances their experience of the urban texture."

This echoes a concern Kushner has pursued in his art ever since his Pattern and Decoration days--a desire to, as he describes it, "make art that's contemporary and relevant, and that's uplifting esthetically and spiritually." The Islamic art that inspired him early on was created in its time to both reflect and evoke spiritual themes, and even to have a spiritually transcendent effect on viewers. Kushner feels that, because the sumptuousness of his latest paintings may be read as the expression of a strong emotional impulse, and because these works are decidedly unironic, they may leave him "exposed." At the same time, like the classic East Asian works that inspired them, Kushner's paintings never really gush; luxurious as they are, their emotional temperature may be cooler than he suspects.