ART
By Alan Artner
Published May 11, 2007

Kim Curtis' paintings at Kasia Kay Art Projects are, as they were a year ago, landscapes that have had their underlying abstract elements uncovered. Form, light and color are paramount in them, but they are not without atmosphere and, apparently a new concern, the instantaneous summing up of a scene that takes place as we drive through a landscape, identifying things only as we move past, by our peripheral vision.

I especially like "Ink and Shadows," which seems a perception received in a flash of something akin to one of the great glass-and-steel arches of a 19th Century European railroad station filled with, say, the bustle and steam of a painting by J.M.W. Turner. None of this is, of course, literal; it's more like an echo or evocation of a scene caught on the wing and frozen while fleeting.

As before, the best pieces are small, long and only a couple of inches high. They are streaks of landscape in which just enough remains of the topographical elements to escape being abstract swipes. There the visible world is reduced to essentials, and the effect is persuasive.

The quality of light in a number of the best pictures is wintry, and capturing that remains her forte, though Curtis produces dusky scenes in more than one season. The larger pictures still do not register on me as powerfully as the smaller, but a scene around a pond in which color patches are tightly interlocked, shows a benefit in having been cast as a triptych.