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Perfect Maze Painting

stephen cimini

United States

Painting, Oil on Canvas

Size: 18.5 W x 30.5 H x 3 D in

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Artist Recognition

link - Featured in the Catalog

Featured in the Catalog

link - Showed at the The Other Art Fair

Showed at the The Other Art Fair

link - Artist featured in a collection

Artist featured in a collection

About The Artwork

Multiple layers of various tones of neutral oil paint are layed over high color, painted canvases to create a “ghost like“ effect. Cold wax medium is mixed with the paint giving the translucent look. The painting continues around the 3 inch gallery-wrapped edges giving an added dimension to the piece. Framing is not necessary however the painting can be set off in a floating frame if desired. This body of work has a meditative feel and at first glance may not impress however the textures and subtle colors that come through give lasting interest. A gallery I was working with at the time was reluctant to handle any of the series however the gallery owner fell in love with them and ended up buying one for herself. Below is a review by Ed McCormack published in 2009 when the series was first exhibited. Charting the Abstract Sublime Normally, the formal and the romantic are regarded as polar opposites. However, the painter Stephen Cimini, a recent recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, can be seen as a romantic in the same paradoxical sense that the older artist Sean Scully, whose “stripe” paintings share a similar fondness for pure geometry, employs the term when he says, “I hold to a very romantic ideal of what’s possible in art ....I’m going against the current ideal of bizarreness, oddness...” As in his previous paintings, the thirteen compositions in Cimini’s “Ghost Series” are built on adjoining, interlocking, and overlapping rectangles. Yet as I have written elsewhere in regard to this artist’s work, it is a romantic –– even a radical –– gesture in today’s eclectic art scene to embrace precision and a certain reductiveness. And in Cimini’s case, it would seem that the more he removes from his paintings, the richer the experience of encountering them can become for the viewer. The latest thing to go in Cimini’s “Ghost Paintings” were the deliciously saturated, sensually smoldering hues –– particularly the seductive purples and violets –– prominent in his solo show at Noho Gallery last year, which could then have seemed indispensable to his aesthetic. Color is still present in the new paintings, albeit muted to a palette of pale, milky pastel and putty hues enlivened by a remarkable variety of subtle painterly textures and tonal modulations within several successive layers of oil paint mixed with the marble dust and the wax-medium that the artist employs to lend his pigments “an organic feel.” The chalky effect of the marble dust, combined with the soft patina which the wax-medium imparts, results in a surface that might more properly be termed sensuous than sensual. Its semi-translucency enables the viewer to perceive a paradoxical sense of layered depth within the ostensibly two-dimensional picture plane, as well as to see the “scribble marks,” made with colored china markers, that are often a part of Cimini’s painterly process, but are usually obscured in the finished painting. These now faintly visible vestiges of a Twombly-esque ecriture, most prominent in the canvas aptly entitled “Automatic Writing,” not only add a daring sense of randomness within a precise geometric context but enhance the spectral element implicit in the series’ title. At the same time, the delicate markings impart a phantom radiance, a sense of sinuous linear auras within the waxen “skin” of the paintings, which plays off exquisitely against the more definite traces of color that Cimini embeds within the precisely incised lines defining his geometric divisions. What the new coloristic austerity in the “Ghost Paintings” accomplishes most effectively is to focus attention even more thoroughly than before on the classical attributes of Cimini’s compositions. The artist himself has attributed the combination of restraint, balance, proportion, and order in his paintings to his early interest in architecture, explaining that his present abstract vocabulary evolved directly from “the linear landscape of New York City.” Yet what really makes one sit up and take notice is the degree to which he has refined and pared down the forms that initially inspired him to create his unique abstract style. For to a degree that has become increasingly rare in contemporary painting, the work of Stephen Cimini is informed by what the twentieth-century Swiss art critic Heinrich Wölfflin, who clarified so many principles of classicism for the modern age, referred to as “the complete cultivation and education of the eye.” Ed McCormack, a former columnist and feature writer for Rolling Stone, and one of the original contributing editors of Andy Warhol’s Interview, has written extensively on art and popular culture for the Village Voice and numerous other publications. Presently, with his wife Jeannie McCormack, he co-publishes the New York art journal Gallery & Studio.

Details & Dimensions

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:18.5 W x 30.5 H x 3 D in

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Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.

BIO— Recipient of the Pollack-Krasner Grant, Cimini primarily identifies as a self taught artist although he briefly studied at the the San Francisco Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His work is held in various corporate and private collections internationally. He is represented by Carter Burden Gallery, in New York and exhibits in various other galleries throughout the United States. ARTIST STATEMENT— Building on the architectural origins which have been the basis of my work for over a decade, I have started referring to my compositions as random symmetry. That is, creating a balance on the canvas with no discernible pattern allowing a symmetrical, meditative composition to emerge. I employ the golden mean as a reference which can often be seen in the composition. I use oil paint with a cold wax medium, layering the paint, as organic surfaces evolve within the restrained lines of the composition. During the process an environment develops giving an emotional story to the thoughtfully planned out compositions. My color choices vary, sometimes deliberating creating a series with particular color decisions and sometimes allowing the color choices to impulsively appear fueled by intuition and experience. Color remains a constantly unfolding mystery.

Artist Recognition

Featured in the Catalog

Featured in Saatchi Art's printed catalog, sent to thousands of art collectors

Showed at the The Other Art Fair

Handpicked to show at The Other Art Fair presented by Saatchi Art in New York, New York, New York, New York

Artist featured in a collection

Artist featured by Saatchi Art in a collection

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