NYAB Event - Tommy Litz “Reverie”

Tommy Litz “Reverie”

Noho Gallery / M55

This event has ended.

Elegant, sensuous and ethereal might best describe the recent work of Tommy Litz. I’ve known Tommy for many years, having worked with him when he was just beginning to develop his art, concurrent with his renowned ice skating career. After a long hiatus we reconnected, at which time Litz was in a very new and exciting place in his artwork. During this interim period he developed a new imagery, reflecting his keen knowledge and appreciation of the human body in motion, attained over many years of professional-level ice skating and instruction.

Litz invites us into an alternate universe where gravity-defying figures, diaphanous drapery and vaporous shapes enter the picture space to converge for a brief moment in perfect harmony. The final effect seems smooth and effortless on the artist’s part. In this respect, Litz’s work is reminiscent of the graceful, elongated figures of the late Renaissance, Mannerist painters. But this belies what I know to be Litz’s deliberate and painstaking art-making process, his relentless drive to “get it right”, testing many possible alternative solutions until form, color, anatomy, and spatial relationships cohere.

Closer to our own time, two other connections come to mind: The sweep, flow and whiplash curves favored by the artists and designers of the late 19th century Art Nouveau movement, and the playful, figurative Art Deco sculpture of the 1930’s, currently enjoying renewed attention. While clearly sharing the sensibility of the sublime and the beautiful of these earlier periods of art, and rejecting the hard geometry of many Modernist movements, Litz employs an exacting abstract sensibility to composition, in which light plays an important role. Nearly all of these images have an internal light source around which the figures circulate. The light itself becomes an active participant in the dance or, as in “DASH OF X”, is framed by the dancer’s bodies, suggesting that perhaps this vortex of light is the work’s true subject matter.

But however one reads (or whatever one takes from) these images, I believe they are, at their core, about love and human engagement, lovingly rendered and at its most ideal.