Writer, Artist and Critic
Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
(Art in America, October 1993)
Painted in a patient, mannered style that almost recalls Grant Wood, these neat tableaux both are and are not landscapes: their symbolic weight is emphasized with strategic intrusions or subtractions. Squares or bands of flat color take their place alongside sky-like or meadow-like expanses in some paintings. In many others, ambiguity is thickened by the removal of orienting markers. In "Yellow Plume" (1992), for instance, a tornado-shaped plume of steam, glowing deep yellow from a hidden light source, rises full-bodied and clear-edged out of--what? a smokestack, a volcano?--its source lost in the darkness.
The large diptych "In the Garden" (1991) has the teasing duality of a classic perceptual puzzle (a goblet? or two faces?). It nominally shows a nighttime backyard scene: a wall of shrubbery and some spindly branches lit from an unseen house window. But it looks and feels like an image of the Inferno, with red-tinged sky and the dry branches crackling like white electrical fire.
Again and again the viewer is pulled toward the light, with its promise of transfiguration or transcendence, and left with uneasy, unevenly-lit darkness. The painting "Last Light" (1992) plays this out almost in a narrative way. A small triangle of light, dead-center on the canvas, depicts the too-quick last moments of sunset in the hills. Squeezed in a powerful torque created by the interlocking angles of hill, ridge and cloud bank, the triangle seems about to shut like a camera lens.
In effect, the two-step response Krutsick engenders in these paintings traces what has become a common experience in nature: submission, or near-submission to natural beauty, interrupted and overlaid by a pervasive disquiet. Better not swim in the water, or taste the rain. Even light, the most distilled of natural phenomena, does not point an escape route, but only illuminates the way things are.
A simple peak-roofed house form has appeared in Krutsick's work for many years. It is featured in several canvases here, each a variation on disembodiment. In "Peak/Peek" (1992) the facing wall of the house emits a form-erasing orange glow against the blue night. The peaked shape of "Motif" (1993) rises out of fuzzy dark foliage or clouds, its white expanse exactly as luminous and flat as the moon's. And in "Up Little Cypress Hill" (1990), the transparent house-shape stands against the sky like a hilltop apparition, seemingly the source of sunset rays. Our at-homeness in nature is disappearing, these images suggest, evanescing into pure idea.
This work stands a little apart from the new landscape painting (Mark Innerst and Joan Nelson come to mind) which takes nostalgia as a central subject. Here, lured by the light, we are taken directly through nostalgia to intimations of despair.
--Miriam Seidel