Dumitru Gorzo ”FEND OFF” @ Slag Gallery, NY

These large canvases have an air of being fervidly executed rather than merely painted, of being impetuously layered and energetically composed, then reined in and hewn as opposed to envisioned, planned and produced. To an extent, this is much like Gorzo’s creative practice in general. Whether painting, sculpting or drawing, he is wont to leave readily palpable traces of his procedural strata at the surface, and to allow his often extemporaneous approach to initial mark-making to guide his compositions into most unforeseeable spheres comprising abstracted figures and curious creatures, or what might even register as organically inflected, technologically implausible architectures and machinery. His trademark summer-vine greens, turquoise blues and subtly blanched, softened pinks come into atmospheric, airy confluence in his backdrops, in which all manner of smallish, darkly inscribed subjects seem to dart about in sparely described, middle-grounded hinterlands. In many of his foregrounds, then, these same colors are deployed as either expressive drips or chromatic bursts seeping through or filling in interstitial voids in much more robustly marked, candidly delineated, physically bizarre yet somehow sympathetic figures and forms.

With these new works, Gorzo’s painterly agency is that of a cave dweller with a preternatural awareness of Guston and Bosch. In other words, this is Gorzo as usual, yet with the energy and volume turned up a notch. One can almost hear all of his figuratively evocative echoes bouncing about throughout mountains, forests and valleys.    — Paul D’Agostino

Dumitru Gorzo received a BA in Painting and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Advanced Studies in Painting from the University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania. He is a co-founder of the artist group and movement Rostopasca, the most influential artist group in Romania for the last few decades. Gorzo has had solo shows in museums such as MNAC (Bucharest), NJ MoCA (New Jersey), and Brukental Art Museum (Sibiu), as well as in art galleries and not-for-profit art institutions across the US and Europe. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at prestigious art venues such as the Istanbul Biennial, Marina Abramovici Institute (San Francisco), Kunsthalle Budapest (Mucsarnok), MODEM Modern and Contemporary Art Center (Debrecen), and Museum Küppersmühle (Duisburg) and Boulder MoCA just to name a few.