J A M E S V E R B I C K Y
A B S T R A C T P A I N T I N G S
Verbicky’s earlier abstractions studiously avoided referring to anything. They could evoke elements and events, and shapes in them might bristle with suggestivity, but they finally insisted on their physical and visual autonomy, claiming to represent nothing but the artist’s inner ideas and feelings. It’s only now that, without losing the intensity of those inner impulses, Verbicky allows his work to engage methods and references that push it into the realm of – well, not the familiar so much as the known. His new abstract paintings are no less abstract for their atmosphere, for their light and nuance, for their persuasive glower in black and white; whether their surfaces have been resined or left raw; whether the extravagance of brushstrokes evocation of space and time; in the final analysis, he is painting paintings, not pictures. But, whether they brim with color or that comprises each of them directs the eye into the painting or bounces it all over – Verbicky’s abstractions now breathe the same air we breathe and, dare I say it, watch the same sunsets. These paintings are not landscapes in great part because they are not places. They do not depict, and are not even dependent on, any given view of any given spot on the earth. Indeed, in the way they vary from one another in structure, light, color, and spatial evocation, they betray the fact that the painter has invented them, forging them out of the process of painting rather than out of a process of looking at something else.”
-Peter Frank
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