Continuing through February 15, 2020
Dallas based artist Marjorie Norman Schwarz is one of the best painters working today. Evidence for this claim rests in a suite of small-scale pieces that adorn a white box space. Beautifully accented by natural light that cascades through a ceiling aperture from above, they are the product of around three years work. The paintings that comprise “Slow Change” are all over abstractions due to a deeply layered surface dense with brushstrokes of restrained length and duration. All are applied with convincing attention, her touch is reminiscent of Seurat’s Pointillism or the delicate side of Monet’s Impressionism. Make no mistake, this work is not merely an Impressionist throwback, but a unique and personal expression from a visionary artist who draws on images and colors from deep within her mind’s eye. Perhaps she channels Rene Descartes’s hermetic res cogitans, a mental material substance, transformed here into visual psychedelia.
Schwarz’s images are not driven by an abstraction from reality or anything that resembles a model. They are the product of her talent with paint and aesthetic instincts. Each stands as an homage to the kind of non-objective painting that communicates depth and swirls of structured color, without resort to horizon lines or other trappings of the natural world. In “Untitled” and “Untitled (Blindspot)” an ethereal sensibility draws the eye into their meditative surfaces, which compel us to consider the nature of perception itself. The paintings resist categorization and never coalesce into a definite image. You could look upon any particular among these works for hours, never tiring of their enigmatic nature, a mysterious puzzle that perfectly represents the best nature of art.
