Eugene Brodsky, Silkscreen Paintings

"In this exhibition of Eugene Brodsky’s silk-screen paintings, the signature image, which appears in his work in various states and scales, is of lace-curtain-covered French doors partially open into a room. A section of an ornamented wrought-iron balcony is in the foreground. The metaphors here are rampant and quite poetic. Layers, silhouettes, openings, and textures—from solid to gauzy as well as transparent to translucent to opaque—play off against one another."

"Eugene Brodsky has always been preoccupied with the visual babble of our image- ridden environment and with the sensuous properties of this cacophony. His overt employment of silkscreened imagery in these latest paintings, large and small - combining oil on panel with silkscreen ink on plastic - clarifies and heightens that preoccupation, and that sensuosity. The method provides Brodsky's paintings with a new slipperiness - not a physical (much less subjective) superficiality, but a visual elusiveness that confounds our efforts to grasp these images as pictures of anything, even when they clearly are pictures of something. Their graphic quality is a matter not of text, even when displaying clearly notational qualities, but of texture. Brodsky thus stands athwart our tendency to literalize what we see, a tendency locked into place by our reliance on the computer. He warns, indeed struggles, against the tyranny of mere knowledge with his fugitive pictures and uneasy sense of pictoriality. Optical pleasure, Brodsky argues, is a perfectly legitimate form of information."