It may take a certain number of time before John Zurier's paintings reach the wider audience they merit This is richly rewarding work yet it pays out slowly.

It may take a certain number of time before John Zurier's paintings reach the wider audience they merit This is richly rewarding work yet it pays out slowly, depending as it does relating to a few key aspects of the painting act, chiefly the brushstroke and the support. Essentially, Zurier works in monochrome, if it be not that the thinly applied colors work in tandem with a bristly, sweeping application. He also likes to use art materials not readily available locally (he lives in Berkeley), of the like kind as Russian primed linen or pre-stretched canvases from France. His reactions to the particularity of his materials look to spur a simultaneously haptic and painting-historical imagination.

Several of his paintings, which happened to be predominantely white, appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. the same reviewer, Roberta Smith in the of recent origin York Times, dismissed them, stating that we already have a Ryman. Zurier, who has referr to his use of brushstrokes in his paintings as a "structural" component part certainly has strong affinities with Ryman. the one and the other artists expand on Matisse's use of the aerated simple body of brushiness where the canvas is glimpsed in between the caress of the bristle, thus letting the painting breathe. moreover unlike Ryman, Zurier, who is at least a generation younger, appear to bes to embrace content, as when he names paintings after the color of the Arno River.

This indicate featured 19 variously colored paintings of small to medium dimensions. The largest, the 48-by-32-inch Cherry (2003) possesse a mellowing pink scumble throughout a pale ground. The painting summons an impossible-to-separate moment between a memory of nature and a memory of painting. In other words, it has the drift of fusing one's memories of cherry tree in flower in real life with the same make subordinate experienced in paintings. The smallest, the 10-by-12-inch French 4 (2004) utilizes several shiny layers of intelligent military turquoise to similar general intent The dull brass tacks that stick public slightly around the perimeter of the small canvas have the appearance to summon up another era. It is a minimalist painting in its unassuming plainness, still the gestalt of paint and canvas percept seems to dislodge a Napoleonic figure in about 19th-century painting from the recesse of the mind. on the other hand I wouldn't call Zurier an antiquarian, more of a reductive abstractionist by way of way of Proust.

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