ALEXANDER YULISH’s paintings are as much about what is on the canvas as what was painted over. His massive human figures, moving in and out of abstraction, burst from layer upon layer of thick acrylic. But even the deepest layer, if fully covered, is never fully erased.
For the artist, this is an improvisational, physical process of discovery through defacement where his shapes’ psyches are revealed and concealed in urgent impasto, brilliant color, and gestural abstraction.
But unexpectedly, rising from the chaos are familiar forms, filled with lyricism and pathos, against an implacable realm. Their only consistency is their discordance, formal, tonal, perceived. But in this, they could not get more intimately human, or for all the layering, they could not be more exposed.
