New Criterion

Paul Resika must be the most interesting
journeyman of modern painting. Born in New
York in 1928, he took up the brush at age nine
and began studying with Hans Hofmann at
sixteen. After his apprenticeship with this
German-born mentor of American abstraction,
Resika followed a circuitous route through
the history of art. He sought out the classical
foundations of art that he saw buried beneath
Hofmann’s own abstract constructions. In the
1950s he began traveling to Europe to study
the old masters, returning to work with the
figurative painters Paul Georges and Fairfield
Porter on Long Island. In the 1960s he went to
Italy to walk in the footsteps of Corot. In the
1980s he began taking on the light of
Provincetown in glistening seascapes. Most
recently he has circled back to Hofmann, with
paintings that have became increasingly
abstract. “I’m with him,” he said of Hofmann in
2000. “I’ve been with him for many years.
He’s been in here. I don’t see him anymore,
but he’s been here.”

What ties these waypoints together is
Resika’s nonconformist sensibility, which he
attributes to Hofmann, and a unique sense of
touch. One could say a line runs through all
of Resika’s work. Just as the Venetian masters
did not need to sign their own paintings,
since their brushstrokes served as their
signatures, Resika has a signature way of
handling paint that is entirely his own.

This facility is now on display in two paired
exhibitions, both called “8+8.” Steven Harvey
Fine Art Projects, on the Lower East Side,
offers an eight-painting survey that covers
each of Resika’s eight decades of work. Hard
to believe such a chronology is possible, but
there it is. The show begins with Composition,
April ’47, a work of triangular origami, and
continues through Three Sails (2009–10), a
constructivist abstraction where triangles
return as sails floating on an angular sea.

Because of a studio fire in 1971, little of
Resika’s early work survives, so what’s
assembled here may be surprising. The
Visitation (1958) is a moody, Symbolist work of
an angel reaching out to a painter sitting
outside his shingled studio. The Bridge,
Vaucluse (1967) is a Barbizon landscape. Self-
Portrait (1974) offers up the artist as an
intense neo-Romantic, complete with beard,
beret, and scarf. Provincetown Pier (Blue)
(1988) and Bright Night (1996), both port
scenes, show Resika’s increasing fluidity,
with a light that shimmers off the dock houses
and boat topsides. In Dream of Jack’s Island
(2006), my favorite of the show, not a curve or
dash seems out of place. Resika’s signature is
the sheer calligraphy of his brush.

For a survey of Resika’s most recent work,
eight examples are now on view at Lori
Bookstein in Chelsea. Turning from the sea,
Resika now focuses on the geometry of the
pond. Lily pads offer up a particularly
intriguing shape, and Resika makes the most
of it. Sometimes he abstracts them into
notched circles (Pond #9, 2010). Other times
they are more illusionistic, dissolving into
sun-drenched reflections (Blaze, 2010–12). It
is hard not to think of late Monet when seeing
these works. The exhibition includes one
monumental canvas, Pond Galaxy (2010), nine
feet across, that doesn’t hurt the association.
Here so much of art history seems to rise to
the surface in circles of color. This includes
Resika’s own colorful legacy, joyfully circling
back on itself.