Thoughts That Cure Radically: Jason Karolak at McKenzie Fine Art Inc.

Space is a metaphor for our lived environment in Jason Karolak’s first solo exhibition at Lower East Side’s McKenzie Fine Art Inc. Pictorial distance is defined by Karolak with two consistent but divergent painting sizes, one large and spatially expansive and the other minute and pictorially flat. While Karolak’s language lives and moves from the dictates of form, color, and line, a language that would seem to imply flatness, the paintings offer a richly detailed representation of pictorial dimension and tactile experience. For Karolak, space, either deeply horizontal or directly planar, is a formal stand in for the recessive or progressive elements of the viewer’s perception of the natural world.

An avid proponent of the possibilities of linseed oil mixed with pigment, Karolak’s paintings evolve from momentary decisions that requires each mark and color choice to add to an overall compositional and tonal whole. The large compositions build from a multi-layered ground made ivory black, titanium white, raw sienna with a medium of distilled turpentine and stand oil undergirded by mixed red ground that lends the blacks warmth. Cage or building-like constructions of aqua, fuchsia, and lime green float within this deep space, barely wedged into the confines of the rectangle. The scale belies the fragility of the form in these large compositions. Moving out of small pen and ink studio sketches, these polychromatic assemblages perched inside the large paintings have the fluid immediacy of quick sketches while maintaining the visual coherence required of grand-scaled paintings. Up close the bars of color break visual uniformity. Displaying the qualities of both hesitation and speed of their execution, the shimmering brush marks and oddly intersected joints channel the nervous kinesthetic touch of the original bamboo reed ink sketches. Dauntingly scaled, the larger compositions imply open-ended vistas, redolent of the Adirondacks envisioned by Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, and an extended geological time that translates into a prolonged visual thoughtfulness.

The small paintings, meanwhile, offer a Gauguin-like palette in the service of dynamic, fast- paced compositions. While the large paintings consist of delicate forms inhabiting deep space, the small paintings are bundled together in bullet like frontal compositions. Small stripes of color create prismatic waterfalls and tight warrens of shallow space. Bejeweled and globular, the smaller compositions imply an altogether excited vision of space, an urban rush of sound and color, signage and movement.

Taken together, Karolak’s paintings cohere into a visual representation of our dual urban and green environment. One group of paintings cannot breathe without the other. The large compositions are a respite from the intensity of the smaller paintings. The cabinet paintings visually re-energize the viewer from an extended viewing that the large lumbering compositions require. Taken together these paintings adhere to the dual demands of a healthy lived and visual ecosystem in all its restorative energy. Inchoate and verbal, confined and expansive, Karolak’s paintings limn the possibilities of color, touch, line and form to evoke the possibilities of a visual world in the mind of the viewer.