In his first show with the newly consolidated Findlay Galleries veteran abstract painter Ronnie Landfield has really pulled out the stops. Career vicissitudes that included heart-wrenching damage to a lifetime’s work during Hurricane Sandy and the subsequent loss of a dream New York studio to gentrification seem to have dented neither the pictorial scale nor the chromatic intensity of this septuagenarian’s prodigious output. Landfield is a fearless dualist. He seduces the eye with sensual landscape possibilities while managing to insist, with delectable obstinacy, on the optical purism of his painterly agenda with pristine bars to offset his effulgent stains. It is a terrible pun that I’ve used before but it is hard to resist some play on the name of an artist called Landfield who is so unabashed in putting terrain into Color Field Painting.
Ronnie Landfield, Threshold of Eternity, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 76 inches
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