April 15, 2006: Reception 6-9pm at Gillock Gallery Evanston.

“You need life experience to tell a story.”

By Matthew Ballou with excerpts from an interview with the artist

Norbert Marszalek’s show, currently on display at the Evanston location of Gillock Gallery, is an exhibition of painter’s paintings. The mostly medium sized paintings consist of frontal portraits of figures in the throes of conversation. They are direct, bold, painterly, and evocative, touching on the intimacy of experience with an acute yet sensitive force.

Marszalek approaches painting with a personal passion unmitigated by rhetoric or gimmickry. His recent series of works titled Dialogue – most of which are on display here – is a collective expression aimed at a subtlety of narrative imagery. “Each painting is a chapter,” according to the artist. Thus the development of individual narrative within each work, the relationship between the people depicted and the artist (and viewer), and the nuances of what can be understood from the works are all major interests for the painter.

In addition to the paintings’ depictive nature is the forcefulness of their construction. There is a sense of contention in their making, in the impasto of the paint and the boldness of the brushstrokes. But this sense of pugilism is in the service of an expressly relational and wholly intimate moment. These works make the cusp of a narrative happening visible. It is a singular, emotive moment around which each of these paintings orbit.

When asked about this latent narrative presence in his works and their ability to express a story, Marszalek is eager to explain that he’s on a journey of investigation. These paintings are parts of a pathway toward a more complete expression. “Recently I feel that I’m able to tell a story with my paintings…I think the next step is to carry it further and really create a painting with more of me in it. It’s not just technically drawing a nose. I want that nose to say something; I want that face to say something…still within the context of telling a story from a human standpoint. I still want to do that.” Of course, with dialogues as their primary context, these paintings certainly contain a sense of storytelling, of pulling the threads of a story into one depicted moment. There is no doubt that the painter himself is present there.

His interest in both the conveyance of the images and the personal content of the stories the images relate rings solidly true in many of the works. There is a rigor present in his painting and in his desire to determine what art-making is in a broader context. He is genuinely concerned with the place painting has in the contemporary art world, and that concern seems to be central to his approach to the art form. “Art has been blown open so wide within the last 100 years that anything goes on some level” He says; “It’s up to us to reel it back in and determine what our criteria are.” Bringing personal parameters to bear on his painting is of far greater interest to Marszalek than bending to the gimmicks and hucksterism seen in many areas of art today. He remains stalwart about what painting is for him; he simply must go about his art in his own way.

Overall, the works on display here show the active, intense, and decisive work of a painter making his way. He’s not wielding a hammer of commentary or instruction. He’s not engaged in melodrama. He’s not painting to convince the viewer of anything. Instead, Marszalek’s painting is primarily situated around his own basic life experience – the expression of those intensely human nuances found in the tone of someone’s skin, the angle of a wall, or a semi-vacant gaze. These small, universal dialogues are the arenas his thick brushstrokes navigate.

See more from Norbert at the following websites:

www.norbertmarszalek.com | www.sharkforum.org

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Updated: 04/13/2006