Steve Smulka
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A group of bottles stand in a clear wash of sunlight or wrapped by blue particles as if glimpsed through a filter. They are just bottles: mason jars, apothecary bottles, decanters. But the degree of wish we project onto our objects is inestimable. We want them contained, a crystalline instant in the ceaseless blur of daily life. We want them beautiful. We want them clean. The degree to which their surfaces and outlines give us pleasure attests to the Oscar Wilde line that people who don't judge by appearances are superficial.
Steve Smulka's paintings deliver the wish with deft strokes. His works are ambidextrous--poised between still life and the hyper-real style of postwar, photo-realist painters like Richard Estes. A caveat applies immediately to this observation, though, in that while the photo-realists often used airbrush or spray acrylic to avoid brushstrokes entirely, Smulka teases up the brushstroke into a wavy aquatic, especially when the glass is blue.
The uses of still life, which emerged in 17th-century Holland, manifested a kind of class- or culture-surfing as well as a laud to the richness of the country. The paintings panned views of banquet or breakfast spreads, tables groaning with the game of the hunt. Even if those weren't your chased silver platters that served the feast, a working person could dream where the nobility lived by hanging a fancy still life on the wall.
Still life became, too, the arena for some of the thrilling achievements of post-impression and of modernism: Cezanne's apples and pears, Morandi's slim-lipped bottles. As vanitas--that is, art's observation of the flimsiness of objects in a fleeting lifetime--the still life could astonish with its perceptual pause.
Though Smulka has never airbrushed or sprayed paintings, he nonetheless plays nimbly on the photo-realist ground at which the canvas itself plays up the illusion of three-dimensionality with a tension so pronounced it feels breakable. While his brushstrokes visibly lick the surface, he works out formal exercises in composition that put the scale of the observing body in an uneasy relationship to the observed things. "The paintings strive to have a physical effect on the viewer," Smulka says.
He is also engaging the history of the genre by selecting for his glass objects the everyday mason jar--which he says is of interest because the embossed writing lets him play with the prismatic light effects. And he may be aware, through some liminal connection that puts us somehow right in the chamber of enclosure that is the body of the glass, that we are eternally seeking to see ourselves reflected in our things.
Cezanne said still life was "grappling directly with objects."
In that context, Steve Smulka's surfaces opt for brilliant illumination and reflectivity to grapple, as a contrast, with the mass of solids. The bottles appear huge, magnified. The impact of their transparency can be slightly unsettling, especially when they come--as they often do--overlaid by blue. The image becomes almost three-sided, as when a swimmer turning in water notices the water's reflections on the pool floor and the ceiling.
Smulka's objects telescope a strangeness that is pleasurable to feel. Looking through his painted bottles disrupts time. Quiet all fleeting thoughts about what else needs doing in favor of the instant's apprehension that appearances are all that exist. Or, as Oscar Wilde urged, go ahead, judge only by what you see.
Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and Ph.D. student in depth psychology.
Steve Smulka's paintings deliver the wish with deft strokes. His works are ambidextrous--poised between still life and the hyper-real style of postwar, photo-realist painters like Richard Estes. A caveat applies immediately to this observation, though, in that while the photo-realists often used airbrush or spray acrylic to avoid brushstrokes entirely, Smulka teases up the brushstroke into a wavy aquatic, especially when the glass is blue.
The uses of still life, which emerged in 17th-century Holland, manifested a kind of class- or culture-surfing as well as a laud to the richness of the country. The paintings panned views of banquet or breakfast spreads, tables groaning with the game of the hunt. Even if those weren't your chased silver platters that served the feast, a working person could dream where the nobility lived by hanging a fancy still life on the wall.
Still life became, too, the arena for some of the thrilling achievements of post-impression and of modernism: Cezanne's apples and pears, Morandi's slim-lipped bottles. As vanitas--that is, art's observation of the flimsiness of objects in a fleeting lifetime--the still life could astonish with its perceptual pause.
Though Smulka has never airbrushed or sprayed paintings, he nonetheless plays nimbly on the photo-realist ground at which the canvas itself plays up the illusion of three-dimensionality with a tension so pronounced it feels breakable. While his brushstrokes visibly lick the surface, he works out formal exercises in composition that put the scale of the observing body in an uneasy relationship to the observed things. "The paintings strive to have a physical effect on the viewer," Smulka says.
He is also engaging the history of the genre by selecting for his glass objects the everyday mason jar--which he says is of interest because the embossed writing lets him play with the prismatic light effects. And he may be aware, through some liminal connection that puts us somehow right in the chamber of enclosure that is the body of the glass, that we are eternally seeking to see ourselves reflected in our things.
Cezanne said still life was "grappling directly with objects."
In that context, Steve Smulka's surfaces opt for brilliant illumination and reflectivity to grapple, as a contrast, with the mass of solids. The bottles appear huge, magnified. The impact of their transparency can be slightly unsettling, especially when they come--as they often do--overlaid by blue. The image becomes almost three-sided, as when a swimmer turning in water notices the water's reflections on the pool floor and the ceiling.
Smulka's objects telescope a strangeness that is pleasurable to feel. Looking through his painted bottles disrupts time. Quiet all fleeting thoughts about what else needs doing in favor of the instant's apprehension that appearances are all that exist. Or, as Oscar Wilde urged, go ahead, judge only by what you see.
Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and Ph.D. student in depth psychology.