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“Martin Timko’s Uncompromising Nature Abstractions”
Although it can be argued that landscape lends itself more readily to abstract treatment than does the figure. Few contemporary artists have succeeded in evolving a personal language of nature forms as the Ohio-born painter Martin Timko, whose impressive solo show, “The Forgotten View,” is at Jadite Galleries, 415 West 50 Street, through January 28.
One’s first impression, on entering a gallery filled with Timko’s paintings, is of earthy essences, expressed in a subtle range of browns, umbers, and deep, burnished reds. Timko’s surfaces are as rugged and crusty as those of Clyfford Still, and his abstract vision of nature is fully as uncompromising as that of the late California painter.
Clearly, Martin Timko does not view the landscape as an earthly paradise; he refuses to romanticize nature. Rather, he celebrates the material realm without sentimentality, evoking a visceral response in the viewer through purely painterly means. The title of this show refers not only to Timko’s desire to capture the underlying energies of nature but also to his formative interest in Abstract Expressionism and its offspring Color Field painting. In fact, Timko’s canvases begin with color fields, and their images evolve as he manipulates the paint. The completed painting remains essentially abstract, with the lay of the land minimally indicated by horizon lines in some works and more sweeping linear forms, suggesting tree limbs, in others.
The fixed frontality of the horizon line is the central image in “Warren View,” a magnificent composition in burnished red hues, while the cursive tree limb motif figures prominently in “A Logan Branch,” with its deep brown impastos. By contrast, a more stratospheric openness is conjured in “Between Earth and Sky,” with its richly saturated blues layered in luminous washes.
Timko is an important painter with a remarkably authorative compositional sense and a gestural dynamism that is absolutely exhilarating. His paintings make no attempt to ingratiate themselves to the viewer. Rather, they compel our attention and win our admiration through his stubborn adherence to larger natural truths.
-Sean Simon, ARTspeak, February, 1991, NYC, New York.
(reproduction, "Warren View")
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