Brian Rutenberg: Saltwater

New York, NY - The cascade of glistening color that exemplifies Brian Rutenberg’s painting is fully present in his exhibition of new work, Saltwater, on view at Forum Gallery from October 30 – December 6, 2014.  The 16 oil paintings in this show are a chromatic interpretation of the coastal landscape, a subject that has been the artist’s principal concern for the last decade.  Their embrace of the trees, meadows, waterways and sky forms a kaleidoscopic narrative of nature, a synthesis of landscape and abstraction that defines Brian Rutenberg’s work.

Working in bold strokes of rich, thick paint, Rutenberg builds and sculpts his surfaces to achieve rhythmic, faceted passages contrasting with pools of light and dark to evoke the endless variants of the landscape that inspires him.  Gestural application gives way to neo-cubist analysis in every painting, making each an independent work as well as a part of a cohesive exhibition.

Rutenberg’s careful but always spontaneous process arises from his experiences as a child in the South Carolina of his youth:

…long before I knew what an artist was, I would scoop up fistfuls of marsh mud, splat it on the dock under the blazing sun and carefully arrange torn bits of colored construction paper across the muck followed by another handful of mud … the rippled edge of an oyster shell was an ideal tool for skimming off layers, revealing bits of color of varying intensity.

Moved by these early experiences and the memory of the places he visited as a youth and inspired by the landscapes he sees today, Brian Rutenberg paints in his New York studio.  With the infinite invention that is Glenn Gould’s pianism playing constantly, he creates the bold variations that arise from his training and experience as an artist and his comprehensive knowledge of art history.