Gasowski’s rigor and experimentation must be seen to be felt

James Gasowski’s art-historical lineage is a continuation of the first U.S. art movement, Abstract Expressionism.

That movement was so powerful it shifted the world’s art center from Paris to New York over the course of the 1940s and 1950s.

Of course, as William Butler Yeats pointed out in his poem, “The Second Coming,” composed in the wake of WWI, the center no longer holds and the gyre has widened farther since then. It’s probably absurd to speak of art centers, art movements and art schools in this day and age, let alone suggest Gasowski is the artist-son of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and others.

Gasowski has the same intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual rigor of those forebears. The Abstract Expressionists were still burdened with the idea that artists were the avant garde, the leaders of culture. They prepared themselves assiduously before taking on the mantle of artist. It is clear, from their various oeuvres, that they first recapitulated art history on canvas.

Gasowski’s oeuvre shows the same progression and internalization of the past. Then he moves on to mature conversations with past masters such as Hans Hoffman on push-pull space, Richard Diebenkorn on color as light field, Baziotes on collective-unconscious symbols, de Kooning on overpainting and forming windows and Brice Marden on calligraphic gesture.

While Gasowski lived here he held deep-dive art salons. I’m sure he’s forever learning and deepening his knowledge of and his advancement of art.

He is not a brooder. If he were a writer, one would call him a “pantser,” as opposed to an “outliner,” working out formal problems of line, color, composition, texture and tone on the canvas. He is relentless and fast, whose hundreds-of-thousands of hours have made him a master.

As with any abstract-expressionist painting, Gasowski’s must be experienced and defy the powers of reproduction.  His painting makes you feel you are a part of the ongoing historical dialectic. You can see him testing theses, antitheses and syntheses. The active searching and revelation is very moving and intensely human. You can feel the struggle and drive, just as you can looking at Cezanne’s depictions of Mont Saint Victoire, redone dozens of times in varying perspectival chips of color. Or with Winslow Homer’s numerous paintings of Prout’s Neck, the time noted for each sitting, his palette ever-changing with the light.

His work will be on show at Rio Bravo Fine Art Gallery through June 25.