MARK ANDERSON (U.S.A., b. 1955)

Anderson executes figurative painting remarkable for its broad, gestural brushwork, and for its use of an extremely bright palette—the latter being reminiscent of the illogical, garish use of color in Fauve and German Expressionist painting early in this century. As a painter Anderson has previously, in various abstract styles, worked his way through late Modernism's and Post-Modernism's systematic, analytic dismantlement of the art of painting. As is richly demonstrated by the paintings in this exhibition, he has now broken through into a new representational rendering of landscape, a highly original kind of work which belongs to the next great age of art history, commencing here at the turn of the millennium.

In these new paintings, Anderson seeks to preserve some of the slapdash freshness of brushwork from gestural abstraction, but his landscapes glow—sometimes literally—with emanant meaningfulness that constitutes a resuscitation of the 19th-century Romantic intent of painters like Richard Bonington, Turner, Constable, Friedrich, Runge, and the Barbizon School. Before Romanticism, landscape or seascape was merely concerned with recording accurately what one saw, because the culture assumed a deity behind the scene imparting value to it. But under Romanticism in the nineteenth century, value in a landscape had to be put there by the artist himself

In the painting Portal Fire I included here, Anderson depicts an ellipsoid pool, shaped like a human eye and seen through trees, as a kind of sacred place where something of great power must arise periodically. Some kind of presence is or has been here, still radiating. There is a Symbolist aspect to this work in the sacral atmosphere and its suggestion of ritual meaningfulness. Significantly, the trunks of the trees in the painting bifurcate and branch at the very top of the picture, alluding to Gothic cathedral vaulting, and thus further enhancing the charge of spiritual import that imbues this painted landscape.

With such paintings, Mark Anderson achieves a newly fused figurative mode of a very high order, managing to restore value of meaning to Romantic pictorial landscape. He forges a gorgeous, individual style out of the discarded technical innovation of mid-century Action Painting and gestural abstraction, together with his use of a highly emotive color sense with roots going back to the Fauves (Matisse, Derain, et al.), even to Monet. The philosophical recovery he effects is buried in, integral with, and inseparable from his newly innovated, very singular, coherent, and moving style. This manner is invested, through his now warm/now cool painterly fusion, with an intellectual penetration and depth, as well as a cultural breadth, that are powerful and firmly anchored.

Portal Fire I
Oil on canvas
59"w x 47.75"h
Mark Anderson

Double Vision
Oil on canvas
50.75"w x 40.5"h
Mark Anderson

Strike the Rock
Oil on canvas
60"w x 48.25"h
Mark Anderson

Walk on Water
Oil on canvas
72"w x 60"h
Mark Anderson

The Chosen
Oil on canvas
72"w x 60"h
Mark Anderson

Into the Light IV
Oil on canvas
50.75"w x 40.75"h
Mark Anderson

Leaf-fall Glowing
Oil on canvas
38.75"w x 14.75"h
Mark Anderson

Joseph's Dream
Oil on canvas
Top triangle 47"w x 23.75"h
Mid panel 28.125"w x 62.5"h
Bottom panel 48.25"w x 20.125"h
Mark Anderson