Jonathan Lasker @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France..

Jonathan Lasker 'The Commerce of Dreams' 2011

A new exhibition of the work of Jonathan Lasker is taking place at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris until 2nd February 2012. |Lasker always produces interesting ideas about painting and abstraction in particular, here is the Gallery text:

'Lasker developes a formal language. He treats the canvas as a zone where strokes of paint are superposed atop one another in a way that is tangible. The marks, often an assemblage of primary or secondary colours, are distinguished one from another through Lasker's bright, intense, and sharply contrasting colour choices. The colours create fluidity or, conversely, pathways that embed themselves physically into the material, with paint building up along the edges. This sense of impasto, or of fluidity, gives the impression of very different temporalities that in turn shape the way the tableau is interpreted. Lasker's compositions are controlled and structured; they oscillate between intuition and analysis. Lasker seeks a pictorial system that justifies itself. He brings the viewer to the brink of instant reflex, identifying with the image represented.'

Jonathan Lasker 'Common Sense' 2010

I like th titles of his works, always optimistic, like 'The Boundary of Luck' and 'Evidence', 'Life Without Thought', and 'Illusions of the Self'. there is always a distance between the viewer and the painting that leaves a 'coldness' or slickness to his work. yet he has a great visceral quality to the surfaces.. a kind of 21st century Abstract Expressionism..