COVID-19
The contradictoriness of Adam Blaustein Rejto’s pandemic paintings, daubed from handmade oil and egg tempera on petite wood panels, takes its time to emerge. They’re abstract; they’re representational. They’re lyrical and lovely; they’re explosive and fragmentary. The hues are sweet and light; they’re heavy and muddy. They’re panoramic; they’re molecular. They’re tender; they’re careless. Those paradoxical descriptors apply to each of Blaustein Rejto’s recent pictures, which also look like the offspring of a relationship between Kandinsky, Chagall, and a sweatshirt my mother wore in the 1980s. Dream-like modernism crossed with personal memory, the viewer’s or the artist’s, seems an adequate framework for it all, and squares well enough with titles like “When I remember you” and “Looking through Rio’s binoculars inside the Widow Jane’s Cave.”
—Lori Waxman 2020-12-04 11:00 AM