NYAB Event - John Smith-Amato "Color and Line"

John Smith-Amato "Color and Line"

Synchronicity Fine Arts

This event has ended.

Synchronicity Fine Arts presents an exhibition featuring New Paintings by John Smith-Amato. This body of work, developed over the past year and a half, is indicative of Amato’s ongoing commitment to the semi-abstract dialogue between the narrative and the personal use of paint. (or what he identifies as the verbal and the visual. )The show’s title: Line as imagination, Color as truth; addresses that dialogue with full disclosure.

The exhibit’s subtext: Color and line / truth and imagination speaks of the dialogue between the literal and the sensuous. In the application of paint he uses color and texture to establish space of a personal nature. This is a space that is felt more than it is graphically recognizable and in that space the view is drawn by reaction to temperature that subjectively affects the viewer as hot colors moving forward and cold colors recede. The use of line is imaginative as it establishes the metaphoric representation of form in the context of space. This application of paint is not new; in fact, Asian painters have been implementing the relationship for hundreds of years. Amato brings to the process, texture, movement and a narrative entirely idiosyncratic to his own experiences in
life.

Highlights of the exhibition are the landscapes, which compose roughly half of the show; Blue Lake and Path to Luminosity are bold and passionate in their bravado, yet they remain nuance driven and articulate in their simplicity. The dynamics of his still life’s is far more subtle and calculated. In Daniel’s Sculpture and Basket w/Tulips, he takes from Cezanne, Braque and Picasso the awareness of tactile and visual space, but uses that space in a far more subdued presentation. In his approach the relationship of the two spaces comingle as one rather than coexist which seduces the viewer to be pulled into the space as though in a vacuum of time. There In his idiosyncratic personages he engages his humanity as metaphor in his poetic line and creates an atmosphere of light, color and texture that creates shape in space. The human elements are numerous but found in nuance not in bravado. The subject matter appears to metamorphosize in the quite and calmness of the moment. This becomes apparent as the viewer is drawn to the color and texture and finds confirmation in the well-chosen use of line in all its minimalism.

Amato currently directs the “ art as therapy “ program for the men of Graymoor/ Saint Christopher’s Inn (the clinical shelter and rehabilitation for men in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Garrison, NY). His work in art and psychotherapy has become an extension of his career as an exhibiting artist and which Amato admits, has become as much a part of his inspiration as nature itself.