Reviews are being collected, collated, stapled, scanned, and compiled in the home office. Meanwhile, here are two -- the first from the 17th Annual Critics’ Residency Program at The Maryland Art Place.

Art Critic: Carter Ratcliffe* (April 2003)

"We usually see abstraction as opposed to figure painting. STANLEY WENOCUR shows their affinities, which are first of all matters of pictorial form. In his abstract paintings, elegantly irregular planes fill the surface. Each plane has its distinct relationship to that surface, and each finds a subtle, nuanced fit with the shapes that surround it. Unity emerges from disparity, and thus one of the goals of art - an image of harmony- is achieved. Cheerful or somber, color flows through the structure of a painting, carrying its harmonies to further refinements. The transition from abstraction to figuration is smoothest if one lets these chromatic currents carry one to a sense of the somber joy that pervades all of Wenocur’s paintings. At least in part, this is the artist’s joy in his powers of articulation, which sometimes produce arrangements of line, plane, and color that we recognize as a nude figure. Wenocur’s abstractions display the formal premises of his art, while his figures show the intensely human significance of formal inventions that, at first glance, might seem to have a purely pictorial meaning.”

*Carter Ratcliffe is a poet and art critic living in New York, He is currently a contributing editor of ART IN AMERICA, SCULPTURE, AND ART ON PAPER. Ratcliffe’s writings have appeared widely in European and American journals and in the publications of museums here and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim, NY, and the Royal Academy, London.

Critic: C.M. Dupre* (April 2003)

"Stanley Wenocur’s paintings are celebrations of a rare form of sensuality: rare because the intent to seduce is seldom so successful, so strangely consecrated. In part, this is because the nude image has a tendency to disarticulate in a state of suspension …. We roam over surfaces, stop in the seams, hover over specks and stains, begin again at disquieting folds. Wenocur has interwoven the basic ingredients of creative acts: the ’real’, the ’symbol’, the ’imaginary’. Most nudes are private but his include the viewer assiduously, as if each canvas has constructed a medium more intimate than a stage. Wenocur’s nudes and hanging figures are entries into a chartable, locatable, traversable place, but they are also nudes and figures related to the depths of pain and loss that live in the vast places of endurance."

*C.M. Dupre is a painter and writer living in Virginia, as well as a teacher of philosophy, studio art, and art theory courses. She has lectured about art at various institutions and has curated exhibitions. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, and she has published many articles, editorials, criticisms, and essays.