Adrienne Ruger Conzelman, owner of ARC Fine Art, a contemporary art gallery in Fairfield, sits down with artist Gary Komarin to discuss his new monograph and his global exhibits.
You have a new monograph, The Cake (Payton Heller). Why do you think the genre is so appealing to collectors?
Everyone loves cake. Worldwide. The cakes arrived at my studio door quietly one late morning. I had been playing with cylindrical stacked shapes since I was a kid, scribbling on the side of notebooks as many will do. One day, without really thinking about it, I attached several flattened-out paper sacks and painted a stacked cake form. A New York dealer who came to the studio found them on my studio floor. He loved them and in a matter of weeks exhibited them in New York at the Armory Show. We were off to the races.
Some viewers grapple with abstraction. In most of your large-scale, oil paintings, you give the viewer some gestural shapes and forms to hold onto. Are those compositional elements intentional for that purpose or do they play a role in your storytelling?
The shapes that float in my abstract paintings are not pre-planned. They come and go as needed. Most are oblique and the viewers of my work will “read” these shapes differently, as everyone sees life through a different lens. The shapes will travel across the canvas as needed—as desired—until they arrive where they were meant to be. This happens quite magically, as they would seem to be on their own. This is a good thing.
Whether in traditional or more contemporary painting, I am instinctively drawn to landscape. The paintings from your “Suite of Blue Sea” series incorporate such division of space into land, sea and sky. Do you find your audience responding well to this trope?
Yes, the “Suite of Blue Sea” pieces have been most popular. The sea and sand and big sky provide space and light and air, both in life itself and on the canvas. One can become free at such times on the beach, and when a wave hits you and you tumble about in the blue sea, you lose the sense of up and down, left and right, north and south. We then attach to the larger forces of nature.
While you’re based in Roxbury, it seems that you are always on the move with shows around the globe. Can you tell us about your upcoming exhibitions?
We have many exhibitions worldwide. These include a museum show in China, as well as exhibitions of new and recent paintings in London, New York, Greenwich, Zurich, Beirut, Paris and Houston.
Clearly, you have a very global market. Do you find your foreign collectors different from your American ones?
Quite to the contrary, they are very much the same. They look and wonder about my work. Many have a slight smile on their face. They seem puzzled and pleased at the same time. They may not speak English and they may dress differently, but the human condition is the human condition, and I am delighted that my work reached an audience on a level that goes beyond the written language. The visual language works on a larger net.
Lastly, any other new exciting projects or developments?
Yes, now that The Cake book is out and about and circulating in many arenas, we are working on the next book about the abstract paintings to be titled, The Pleasure Principle. This book will deal with beauty and our great need for it in life that can be so complicated and devoid of pleasure. Color speaks to all people as does the taste of food, or the feel of one’s feet in the sand or a drop of rain on one’s tongue. Beyond The Pleasure Principle, we have a new series of vessel pieces and cakes that we will show in Paris and Vienna in late 2024. The good thing about being a painter is that the energy feeds more energy, and the work, which is really “play,” goes on and on.