I attempt to invent new ways of painting, new ways of making and new ways of seeing. My work is about individuality, fragile and mercurial, and reflects my search for the absolute, in beauty, a new painting process, and a distilled purity of idea and form.

As with my previous work, my recent research has been directed by my desire to invent a new abstract language. For me, painting is a disciplined act of faith, one full of struggle, yet with potential for yielding the unexpected.

Central to my practice is the interiority of paint and the act of painting itself. My interest is in its basic physical traits and properties, in concert with my hand and my ability to control it and coax from it an array of configurations, that shift, twist, and change until the painting reaches a stasis. When multiple cross-sections of paint reveal their inner nature and fluidity, a moment still fixed in time, represented by a bounty of colors liberated from within, something new and unrecognizable as paint, presents itself.

For me, painting is about fulfilling a need to create an object of beauty. I want my work to be touching and sincere, and hope that my involvement results in a transcendence, of the everyday, with its ever-present conditions and challenges. I make self-referential, intuitive objects, that avoid any polarity or affiliation, painting as itself, full of mystery, timeless, yet forever new.


Vadim Katznelson 2006