Statements About the Work
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SERGIO GOMEZ
Many of Sergio’s figurative paintings begin as drawings of himself with reflective writings scripted directly onto the canvas. These painting are as much about the process as they are about the subject in that they are the result of a meditative exercise. To these drawings, he then intuitively applies layers of color in thin washes that run and drip down the canvas masking the identity of the figure. Deliberate and meandering lines that sometime run off the edges indicate both the visible and invisible boundaries in the physical world. The obscured figure represents all mankind, thereby allowing Sergio’s artistic expression to resonates with our own search for identity, truth, and higher self.
Ruth Crnkovich
MARK ZLOTKOWSKI
Kick the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight.
The work makes sense of seeming paradoxes: the urban meets the wilderness; fires burn without consuming; the mundane, ephemeral stuff of life cracks open to reveal its eternal substance. Ghosts haunt the present material world until that very world is physically altered as a human body is altered not only by the processes of physical life—childbirth, injury, aging—but by interior, emotional and psychic experiences—spiritual epiphany, disillusionment, falling in love.
Though the paintings are filled with imagery of division—seemingly clear boundaries between the concrete and the mystic—upon scrutiny, these divisions give way, almost melting into a vastness beyond or within them—it is never entirely clear which. Weathered wood, riveted steel, plaster walls…these harsh architectural elements stand in for the limits of mortal life. As they are broken into by landscapes of imagination, those limits are revealed themselves, to be imaginary.
Zlotkowski is not a preacher. His work doesn’t exhort or cajole, yet it moves. Where and how it moves is left up to the individual to decide. The canvasses interact with the viewer, allowing each person’s own history to enter the image and determine its meaning. Zlotkowski hopes to encourage his audience to a deeper understanding of their own experiences of pain and joy; to look for the enlightenment awaiting them in the simple tasks of everyday life.
As Zlotkowski’s work has evolved in recent months, the familiar patterns of his vision have begun to shift. The small apertures of light found in the earlier canvases explode, revealing uncontrolled burning rather than a heavenly vision. Formerly ordered spaces bleed into each other, muddying neat divisions seemingly against the artist’s will, even as they create stained-glass patterns of painfully birthed sacred light.
While archetypal elements remain—water and fire, male and female, darkness and light—in the most developed of these canvasses, attempts at tight containment of dyads fails exquisitely. The suggestion is a triumph of natural impulses over sophisticated technologies; an honest if painful rending of the all too human work of subduing the powerful instincts that give rise to the complex life systems of the universe.
Above all then, these paintings begin to suggest a return to more primitive time and space; a forced exile from ordered life. There is something at once ominous and promising about the vision these canvases reveal. Suffering is foregrounded, and yet hope for redemption remains imminent. A terrible beauty here reminds us that the gift of transcendent vision, even when it tears us apart, is still a gift. In this work, we can all experience the struggle—and the pain—sometimes required to accept that gift.
Shannon LC Cate |
Sated with figurative images, Sergio Gomez’s paintings are imbued with meditations on the multifaceted experiences of human condition and spirituality throughout the cycles of life. The artist unabashedly delves into the essence of humanity and the human condition, daring to use himself as the subject in many of his paintings. The black and white shadowy figures are representative of the flesh and the spirit, with the black images being of this earth whilst the white figures appear to represent transcendence into the higher self, the soul or the spirit. Much of Sergio’s work deals with the subject of man’s search for inner peace and a higher form of consciousness in the face of strife and difficulties associated with the human condition. 
Mark Zlotkowski has been an artist for as long as he can remember, and in his latest body of work, memory and experience are layered so thickly as to reflect a lifetime of creative process. His heavy canvases are almost sculptural in their rich density but are constantly breaking open with light in unexpected ways. Hopeful without looking away from the reality of suffering and trauma, Zlotkowski’s work bears witness to deeply personal versions of shared human experiences.