According to a rabbinic legend, a king was distraught when his favorite diamond was scratched, but a skilled jeweler redeemed the royal loss by transforming the blemish into the thorn of a rose he proceeded to engrave upon the stone. Don Kimes is an artist whose career has a similarly cathartic sense of redemption to it. A catastrophic flood some eight years ago wiped out the best part of his life’s work and its documentation. He has since made the damaged residue of that disaster the starting point of abstractly reworked imagery that utilizes scans of what’s left of the originals, often to startling effect. “I am using the second part of my life to re-paint the first. The flood turned out to be a gift, an exquisite interruption,” the artist has written. Metaphors of alchemy are well-worn in art discourse, but for once they make sense.
DAVID COHEN
Don Kimes, Todi Steel and Popolopen Memory, 2008. Acrylic and ink painting on digital ghost on canvas, 55 x 76 inches. Courtesy of Denise Bibro Fine Art where the exhibition, Don Kimes: Exquisite Interruption, continues through July 9. 529 West 20th Street, #4W, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212-647-7030
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