A spring a thousand years ago, 2012, glue tempera on cotton, 72 x 44 inches (182.88 x 111.76 cm)
Goings on About Town: Art, John Zurier
By Peter Schjeldahl
June 24, 2013
Linger awhile with abstract paintings in several sizes and mediums—the most striking, dry and luminous distemper—that seem at first to rehearse old looks of brushy monochrome, sometimes inflected with a rough dividing line or drifting patches of another hue. The formal vocabulary is indeed ordinary, but its articulation proves poetic in slow-acting, ultimately moving ways. You might not have guessed that the occasion of most of the works was a sojourn of the artist’s in Iceland but once the fact is revealed, it becomes almost obvious. The pale, quakingly sensitive colors, in austere formats, evoke eked-out transports of a hard place. Through June 22.