Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Ronald Slowinski at Canfield

Ronald Slowinski at Canfield
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Sarah S. King

Ronald Slowinski, a prolific painter who divides his time between Kansas City and Taos, has been exhibiting throughout the U.S. since the 1950s. This recent show of 45 works spanned more than four decades, tracing his artistic development, as he has drawn from a wide range of styles and influences that include Matisse and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The show began with a handsome grouping of early large-scale geometric abstractions from the 1960s. These compositions, which set up intriguing architectonic relationships, consist of quasi-symmetrical configurations of flat, interlocking bands of opaque color, often blues and reds. By the beginning of the 1970s, however, Slowinski's work had segued from these systemic formal approaches into a painterly Abstract Expressionist vein, clearly informed by the Southwestern landscape and the spiritual and esthetic legacy of the Native American cultures that developed in it.

Over the next two decades, the artist produced several distinct, though occasionally overlapping, series of works titled "Pollen," "Hopi Flower," "Corn Dance" and "Prayer Stone." In these contemplative compositions that recall Rothko's works, metaphysical preoccupations are expressed in soft, luminous, rectangular expanses of color achieved through the gestural and fluid layerings of acrylic paint, applied with Japanese hake brushes. Works from the "Pollen" and "Prayer Stone" series, which feature a range of tones derived from single- or two-color fields respectively, are typically rendered in shades of blue or brown-red flecked with tiny shards of bright color. These paintings conjure an array of associations that include cloud formations and harsh or ebbing light over the high desert's rugged terrain, as well as Monet's water-lily-covered ponds.

In contrast, the "Hopi Flower" and "Corn Dance" works depend much more for their effects on line and edge, frequently incorporating improvisational elements as well. These Kandinsky-esque compositions feature intersecting outlines of parallelograms along with circular and trapezoidal shapes that seem illusionistically suspended above streaked pastel fields overlaid with wild drips, daubs, splashes and blobs in vivid colors and brilliant white. This gestural spontaneity is effectively counterbalanced by the precision of the underlying geometrical forms.

Beginning in the '90s, Slowinski introduced representational elements into his atmospheric compositions--the human figure and pueblo architecture. In a diptych from 2004, the outline of a man's head and upper torso appears against a dove-gray and brownish background punctuated with pale swirling strokes suggestive of shooting stars. In these works, Slowinski continues to explore the ways in which the rational and the spiritual interact within the ever-shifting terrain of human consciousness.

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