Excerpts from Passionate Play and Intimate Immensity: Recent Paintings of Gary Kaleda


Gary Kaleda applies different degrees of abstraction in his paintings. They have the vitality and strength of an artist who has learned what it means to see in a visionary way. By this I mean this artist has mastered both the means to record what he sees in front of him while also controlling to a large degree the recording of internal mental impressions of the world around him as well. In this respect one might say the artist is objectively laying down his subjective responses using color, contour and composition.

His [Kaleda’s] repertoire is wide, as is his ambition to persuade the viewer to enter into his world of sexuality and of the passions.

What is most striking in the artist’s oeuvre is the sense of infinite complexity and reach that somehow lodges itself in the core of each work. At the same time an intimacy of private experience also surges through each work. Kaleda is in full control of his medium and is supremely confidant in his vibrant scaffolding of space.

The most captivating aspect of Kaleda’s work is the near operatic range of his effects, pictorially, coloristically and in terms of plasticity. The intimate immensity of his work is its hallmark. His imagery is passionately realized and forceful, lyrical and violent, resolute and remarkably tender. Gary Kaleda has mastered the sensualized idiom of the body and its contours, as well as its place in both space and place, while elevating the art of image making itself.


D. F. Colman is an art reviewer based in Manhattan.


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