Paul Resika, Empty

Empty

paintings

PA U L R E S I K A

Paul Resika EMPTY paintings

February 15- March 19th, 2017 Resika painting on the Cape, 2017, photo by Blair Resika

steven harvey fine art projects

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BLUE NIGHT, 2 BOATS, 1990, O/C, 40 X 31 ¾” (cover)

Paul Resika, Rocking Blue, 1990-92, private coll:ection: Woodlands, Texas

Resika’s empty paintings are a bit like getting lost in Venice at night. Somewhat disoriented, you wander by buildings that seem familiar yet have no accurate sense of location. Architectural elements are repetitive and dreamlike and yet It feels like a safe mysterious space.

The idea of paintings by Paul Resika which seemed empty, first came up in conversation in the mid 90s. There were a group of large paintings he’d done with floating elements, like Rocking Blue, 91-92 with it’s empty single building and boat askew in the rectangle. These works used a stage-set- space and seemed to push Resika’s work closer to abstraction..

Resika’s painting have long been seen as inheritors of the Hofmann school, where he studied in the nineteen forties with friends such as Robert De Niro Sr and Wolf Kahn. His painterly language is no doubt the result of the figurative impulse that emerged in Hofmann’s against the historical tide In 1950 Resika went to Italy in search of the classical training he’d missed at Hofmann’s., He ended up in Venice working with with the American expatriate Edward Melcarth on classically influenced murals for labor unions. This led Resika to Italian pintura metafisica. The empty spaces of De Chirico, Carra and Sironi are echoed in Resika’s boat house architecture and empty vessels, redrawn in the cools blues and hot oranges.

Resika’s emptiness is about the essential aloneness of self and the calm relationship with others that exists among the elements,. They evidence a rightness of place. His color originally taken from nature ultimately envelops us in painterly monochrome like a warm rapport atmosphere old friends.

-Steven Harvey

EGYPT, 1998-1999, O/C, 64 X 52” collection: Center for Figurative Painting

BLUE SAIL, 1997-1998, O/C, 63 3/8 X 50 3/8”

VESSELS, RED, WHITE, BLUE, 2000, O/C, 20 x 24”

FLOWERS AND SAILS, 1994, O/C, 40 X 30” private collection

GLADIOLAS, 2016, O/C, 51 X 38”

WHITE MAST, 2005-2017, O/C, 16 X 20”

EYE ON THE BAY, 2001, O/C, 18 X 24”

DE MARTINI, 2009, O/C, 40 X 30”

back cover: YELLOW HOUSES, 1993, O/C, 16 1/8 X 12 1/8”

steven harvey fine art projects

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