Tuesday, July 05, 2005


Untitled, Acrylic on Canvas, 2002, Private Collection, Washington DC Posted by Picasa

An Elemental Gesture

Novelist Chris Gardner writes about his reaction to Assefa's work:

If the act of seeing is eternal, the instant in which we think about seeing is not. Assefa’s work to me seems to inhabit that space--between our seeing and our thinking. His paintings and assemblages are almost monumental and elemental, as talismanic gestures, yet composed of sometimes tiny strokes, the equivalent of whispering with a brush upon canvas. I was immediately intrigued by the interplay between the richly painted surfaces and the fragile human and animal forms which float like smoke-ghosts and emerge almost as pareidolic image. To see anew the horse, the prototypical symbol of virility and speed, an enduring motif in human history, subsumed into the flatness and geometry of his cutouts was a startling experience.

Assefa's treatment of living forms, especially people, is so abstracted as to imply an almost unconscious iconoclasm against their depiction. There is the grace of his forms, care in each calligraphic stroke. His work inhabits many genres at once yet achieves a synthesis without becoming overly idiomatic. There’s always something to startle, especially when one examines his paintings at the tiniest levels. Sometimes I think he’s reinvented decorative painting, and at other times believe he’s reclaimed the most primal form of artistic gesture. In either case, they are quite resistant to a final word. There’s the playfulness and multidimensional space of Chagall, and a spiritual expression akin to the living corpses of El Greco. To me, to name influences would be to miss the invention, as well as to do violence to a singular vision.