Kathryn Markel Fine Arts announces a new exhibition,“Introductions”, featuring paintings by four artists new to the gallery – Gregory Goldberg, Cynthia Rojas, Greg Slick, and Arielle Zamora. Each of these artists has a unique visual language to express a specific agenda and although each of them paints abstractly, their paintings all reflect their reactions to the real world.

The paintings of Greg Goldberg consist of an accumulation of many layers of thin glazes of color added over a period of months. Each color choice is a response to the time of day, the season, and the weather, and thus reflects Goldberg’s reaction to light in a particular moment of time. Goldberg then records each brush stroke with a color swatch and date, on a corresponding watercolor paper guide, documenting the process of each painting. There is meticulous care taken in the painting process, and yet the paintings themselves seem so spontaneous and immediate. Gestural mark-making gives them a free-flowing, almost musical energy as brushstrokes engage and move with one another in graceful harmony. Goldberg has exhibited his work at numerous galleries and non-profit spaces including Artist Space in New York and James Barron gallery in Connecticut. He has had recent one-person exhibitions at the National Arts Club in New York and the Cornwall Library in Connecticut.

Cynthia Rojas creates her paintings with an insistent, intuitive line and colorful, eccentric shapes. Annual trips to Mexico have had a major influence on her palette and vintage textiles, while architectural motifs and aerial landscape views influence her choice of forms. Rojas synthesizes all this into a unique visual language that produces ambiguous spaces that are abstract but also based on a dream reality that only Rojas can access. Rojas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited in galleries around the country as well as in Japan, Spain, and Thailand. She lives and works in New York.

Arielle Zamora’s paintings are contemplative, minimal constructions based on her own, very personal, slightly eccentric geometry. Her painstaking process involves layers of joint compound and paints to create a ground that allows for flat color as well as lines physically etched into the surface. The chance imperfections inherent in the joint compound plus her subtle color palette soften the mathematically-informed edges, shapes, and lines which seem to rise out of the ground and not be imposed on it. Zamora received her BFA from The Oregon College of Art and Craft and has exhibited extensively in the Northwest area. She lives and works in Portland Oregon.

Greg Slick’s new paintings are informed by time, history, archaeology, and anthropology. Flatly painted, piled up and overlapping forms refer to mountains of geologic and human history. They suggest ancient megalith structures as well as contemporary “mapping. Slick says “My paintings investigate ideas of monumentality through the geometries of prehistoric archaeological sites. Using color, texture, patterns of entoptic phenomena and occasional references to digital mapping my work examines how megalithic shapes can occupy space in different and surprising ways within an abstract language. Hard-edge forms reinterpret tumbles of stones at Neolithic sites as a composition of texture/color upon a vibrant ground. Color schemes allude to changing light in rural areas where these stones are found. The intended challenge to the viewer is to read deeply and consider the meaning and politics of monument building along the human journey.” Slick is a visual artist and independent curator based in Beacon, NY. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and non-profit spaces in New York as well as at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, the SUNY Ulster Gallery and the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz. He lives and works in Beacon, New York