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Vincent Katz James Nares makes his own oversize brushes with which he puts long, continuous strokes on canvas. Like the master calligrapher, Nares builds through endless repetition the skill necessary to achieve a satisfying stroke. Relaxing conscious control over his action, the artist himself is often surprised by what happens. This process is also akin to the improvisational skill of the jazz musician, who does not know exactly what a solo will sound like before he has played it. Nares paints and paints on a blank canvas, wiping away unsatisfactory attempts. When he achieves the first stroke he likes, he seals it in resin. That stroke thereby becomes the statement succeeding strokes must react to and modify. In his current series of untitled paintings (all oil on linen, 1995, 195 x 160), Nares has attempted to keep each stroke separate, without much overlapping. He has also kept his backgrounds flat beige or tan. Some spatters result from the twisting of his brush, as Nares moves across the surface. This sinuous, twisting effect, which gives Nares's forms a remarkable dimensionality, is emblematic of his work. He has long used the declarative lines of his brush fibres to create an illusionistic play of depth. The colors of his strokes are quite plain in the exhibition as well, (white, blue, ocher); only one of the five paintings has a red stroke. There are generally three to five strokes per canvas. Due to Nares's technique of coating earlier, decided-upon images in resin, the whole surface ultimately maintains a very smooth veneer. Within this seemingly restricted framework, however, Nares produces visual fireworks. The painting with the red stroke between two blue ones reveals hidden ghost images of earlier strokes. The bottom blue implies speed with its direct, bouncing exit off the right edge, followed by trails and drops to the left. The top blue is a tortured snap of the same image - a burst of paint trailing drips in its wake. This is the closest Nares gets to controlling drips in the manner of Pollock. Generally, the drips are incidental to the main subject of the large strokes. The strokes themselves, though sizeable, are not necessarily bold or violent. There is a certain wispiness or tentativeness to some of them - for example, the central red image. It starts on the left edge of the canvas, moves lithely towards the middle, where it makes a strange inversion, twisting, almost breaking off, before curving upwards to the right with some attendant spatter. To follow the course of one stroke is to relive again and again a narrative the artist has already experienced. |