Painting Review

Judy Csotsits’s works can be best described as aqueous. It connotes fluidity, of seamless motion, but also a unique kind of motion. While we are dealing with a uniform body with water, its slipperiness and ability to morph into endless contortions gives it a rarefied place in the natural world, despite its ostensible abundance on Planet Earth.

Ms. Csotsits may have been content with painting liquid fury, limiting her creativity to an expression of wateriness. But she takes the phenomenon and extends it through the use of warmer colors. Through this, we are extending ourselves into thinking not of water but of kinetic action.

And this action is not a gentle rowboat but almost a violent havoc. Some of the titles suggest a correspondence to the celestial movements which impact and impart motion onto our Earth’s oceans – perhaps we have an invisible potency revealed visibly as a representation of feminine ferocity? Not as jabs or scattered paint as another artist might try to convey, but this force is depicted as unique timeless ripples which take on different patterns depending on the light that is reflected upon them, and indeed the time in which the artist created them.

And technically, it is quite the feat to accomplish the painting of the diffraction of light on such a slippery composition. We do not have any jarring from our eyes – it gives a positive imitation of nature and a slight sense of wonder as to the inconceivable slurry lines that are closer to photographic elements than of a painter.

Joseph Hazani