When completed, the
artist's Central Park fantasias come to us in a Constructivist style
that reflects, and deflects, the multiplicitous formats of nature
itself--sometimes, in an elliptically architectural, plane-begets-plane
manner. At other moments, it is as if his radicalized pastorals
were being viewed through several wildly, willingly complementary
kaleidoscopes. Indeed, Anatoly Krynsky pictures forth all this
natural--naturally, a la mode--by their very on-canvas breakdown, a
generous and generative process that releases them from, then sends them
back into, whirligig union with one another. Anatoly Krynsky's
palette is a staunchly marvelous one, including midnight and daylight
blues, incautious browns and substantial ochres, sunnier-than-sunny
yellows, bold violets, ingratiating blacks, even gold-toned reds.
And, his own, distinctively Constructivist style has evolved over the
past 20 years. Paintings from the early 1980s are most
expressionist in execution. Colors are mainly primaries, badly, if
never indiscriminately, rendered. Largish
stretches of roiling, rippling brushwork show the parkland almost
breathing fire, no matter how idyllic the setting.
Works from the mid-'80s and early '90s are more restrained. They feature
brushwork that "breathes" almost by holding its breath. Formal
effects are less primal, more intriguingly intimate. Colors are
more convivial in tone. The ubiquitous Japanese cherry trees of Central
Park, multicolor mats of fallen leaves, and the alluringly careering
walkways of the park are now more lyrically, and, somehow, more
significantly, dispatched.
And the work of the recent past? Trees are thrown off in lemons and
blues, light
manifesting everywhere, anywhere, often in dappled yellows and picks.
Formally,
Anatoly Krynsky gives us updated and all-at-once the raw, in situ,
on-canvas
deconstruction of his beloved nature together with its ongoing
structural reconstruction of his beloved nature together with its
ongoing structural reconstitution. It is a wholly a-seasonal, universal
sort of nature the artist
is picturing, Central Park by way of pre-Fall Eden.
Still, for all their stylistic divergency and growth, Anatoly Krynsky's
paintings have, over the years, maintained a consistency of dramatic
affect and achievement. Even better, Anatoly Krynsky has penetrated for
us weary Gothamites the usually hidden "beauty part" of a
metropolis that often seems like just
another one of the decadent "cities of the plain." In his
paintings, we are in the thrall of nature as the sublime heart of an
often heartless town. Then, suddenly, we realize that that heart is just
as much Anatoly Krynsky's own.
Gerrit
Henry is the author of the monograph Janet Fish, Burton &
Skira, and a book of poems, The Mirrored Clubs of Hell, from Little,
Brown Company. Mr. Henry is a contributing editor of ArtNews, and
reviews regularly for Art in America. |
