By Michael Paglia
Westord

January 26, 2006

"Using plants and flowers as source material for artwork is definitely an old-timey pursuit whose roots (pardon the pun) go back to the dawn of the Greco-Roman era. Here we are in the 21st century, and many contemporary painters -- not just realists -- still draw inspiration from the ubiquitous foliage. I guess it makes sense, since plants are beautiful things that are all around us. Well, except in January in the Mile High City.

Winter is hardly the time of year you expect to see flowers in Denver -- outside of florists or grocery stores, that is. So maybe it's our collective desire for spring that caused two of the city's top galleries to present shows of floral abstractions in four separate solos. The warm subjects are ideally suited for these cold (or at least coldish) days.

With the trees bare and the grass brown, seeing the vibrantly colored works of art in these shows is like stepping into May. But don't get me wrong -- none of these shows present flowers in a traditional, representational or straightforward way. Instead, the botanical motif is simply one element among many in fairly elaborate abstractions, with each of the four artists coming up with a completely distinctive -- and contemporary -- take on the timeworn subject..."

"...Robert Kushner: WINTER BOUQUETS at Sandy Carson on Santa Fe Drive could well have been installed with the shows at Robischon, because Kushner, like the artists showing there, also uses depictions of flowers as key components in his pieces.

Kushner, who was born in California in 1949, began exhibiting on the East and West coasts in the 1970s and is now a nationally known artist with work in many important collections, including London's Tate Gallery and the Whitney Museum in New York.

The paintings at Sandy Carson are odd in any number of ways, none more so than the fact that they seem to be completely about the creation of luxurious surfaces and could be called "decorative." As bad as that might sound, when you look at the fabulous effects Kushner achieves with paint, metal leaf and glitter, it's hard to knock him for being shallow.

There's clearly a Japanese quality to Kushner's paintings. Some look like panels from screens, particularly "Conservatory Scatter I: Doors," a diptych -- in oil, acrylic, glitter, gold and silver leaf, and mica -- that was done on a pair of antique Japanese sliding doors. Kushner painted four vertical bars filling the entire background of the doors. Scattered from bottom right to top left are blossoms, some outlined in glitter.

Another piece from the same series is "Conservatory Scatter V," which is similar, though painted on the more conventional foundation of stretched canvas. The vertical bars of blue, umber, black and gold are arranged in a complicated rhythm; on top Kushner rendered red peonies and green boughs and leaves, a few of which are accented with glitter.

The use of glitter in several of these paintings is unexpected, since it's a material that's more often associated with grade-school art projects than contemporary art. But traditional Japanese artists sometimes used shavings of colored minerals -- which look just like glitter -- for their screen panels. I'd bet that's where Kushner got the idea.

Robert Kushner: WINTER BOUQUETS at Sandy Carson is a very unusual show, and the paintings are very quirky both technically and aesthetically. But somehow this extremely weird solo worked perfectly for me, especially as the ideal chaser to the thematically interconnected trio at Robischon."