Review
Art & Antiques
February 1997

What's in a brushstroke?  According to James Nares, quite a lot - still.  Nares, once an underground filmmaker, has become a painter who creates sleek, theatrical paintings centred upon a single brushstroke.  These flamboyant swirls look like time-lapse photographs of a dancer twirling with a piece of brightly coloured silk.  They also evoke Oriental calligraphy, the bold, cartoony brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein, and the tactile loops of painter David Reed.  Like Reed's, Nares's swirls seem to hover in three dimensions, with bold colors that range from bloody vermillion to indigo (as in Untitled, below).

But in Nares's work, each character stands alone.  For all their apparent spontaneity , these works result from meticulous effort: Nares makes his own brushes, and often swipes over and repaints until he finds a moment that works.  Almost half a century after the advent of Abstract Expressionism, the drama of the painterly gesture has been cast and re-cast.  But Nares's work exudes such poise, one gladly returns for an encore.  Opens Feb 6 at the Lemberg Gallery in Detroit.