Throughout his career
Charles Katz was committed to painting in the abstract tradition
and was highly influenced by the New York School. In his writings
from the late 80’s Charles noted his intention “to
communicate man’s attempts to understand and express the
mysterious crossroads where individual awareness meets the collective
unconscious”
In the 80’s Charles worked primarily with acrylics and
with a youthful vigor he explored size, gesture and color. Following
in the footsteps of some abstract expressionists, he used the
technique of painting directly onto unprepared canvas which
absorbed the acrylic and muted some of the colors. In the painting
Aerial Freed the massive
strokes and bright reds in the foreground evoke a highly personal
sense of joy on a dark substrate. The gestural nature of this
painting, the random vertical movements of the reds speak to
a flight of fancy and the liberation of Shakespeare’s
mythical literary shit disturber. Although most of his 80’s
paintings are large in gesture and scale, there is something
a little tentative about his use of the medium – the paint
itself is thinly spread and not yet pushed or built up with
confidence.
When he returned to Toronto, Charles reduced his scale and began
to seriously experiment with and push his materials. Still in
the abstract tradition, this time working with the discipline
of grids on board, or amorphous organic forms, he pushed paint
on top of paint working with both acrylics and oils. In paintings |
like Circle
Yellow, or Awakening
Spiral, the paints were mixed with an intensity of color
into which he introduced wax for a muted effect, or non-traditional
elements – sand, marble dust, broken glass. In these paintings
he simultaneously works up the surface and reveals a subtext.
According to Charles, these materials served to alter the surface
tension, to break the context in which the viewer relates to
surface composition, to magnify and evoke attack, texture, color
and tone.
In his last years of his life he secretly worked on two series
of paintings – one muted and the second bright and expressive
– both untitled. The first, a series of experimental paintings
on large format paper, starting with a thin wash of color, moving
inward on the paper to hard acrylic grids that are finally built
up with the addition of his signature elements marble dusts
and broken glass. These evoke a weighty pyramid effect built
up on shifting sand – in this case paper. With the second
series he returned to unprepared and un-stretched canvas
and this time he built up his paints with a newfound confidence.
The eight works, of varying sizes and shapes, break with tradition
and have white as the under-painting and are built up to a darkness
that simultaneously evokes an internal and external abstract
landscape. And then there is a random, unexpected, narrow gesture
of bright color and light.
Click on the thumbnails below to view paintings. |
