Nick Ostoff

[Nick Ostoff]'s work continues modernist painting's project of defamiliarizing the act of looking, of abstracting a scene until the act of seeing itself is pushed back to an earlier phase - one in which we must struggle to make things out. The artist's former pictorial themes of empty...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Canadian art (Toronto, 1984) 1984), 2009-07, Vol.26 (2), p.91
Main Author: Saint-Pierre, François Xavier
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Art exhibits
Ostoff, Nick
Visual artists
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:[Nick Ostoff]'s work continues modernist painting's project of defamiliarizing the act of looking, of abstracting a scene until the act of seeing itself is pushed back to an earlier phase - one in which we must struggle to make things out. The artist's former pictorial themes of empty and full, near and far are now subordinate to a theme of transition; softly glowing voids are interrupted by trajectories. In the painting Lights, seven painterly daubs positioned above a pale scumble on a grey ground are reminiscent of atmospheric landscape effects. Branches depicts sparse, overlapping diagonal lines on a lambent yellow surface. The viewer's expectations of nature, such as bark's furrowed texture or a tree's shape as defined by light and shade, go unmet. Branches is an abstraction of nature, an angular ideograph.
ISSN:0825-3854