James Bohary - NEW YORK SUN review (14 May, 2005) James Bohary John Goodrich, New York Sun May 12, 2005 Abstract expressionism is a tough act to revisit. Whose gestures today could seem as authoritative -and yet so personal- as Jackson Pollock’s? Nevertheless “Ab-Ex” continues to be a fertile source for many contemporary painters, among them James Bohary, whose encrusted but quirkily disciplined canvases remind us that good expressionist painting is more than just soul-baring pyrotechnics. The 65- year-old painter has been producing his own brand of lushly abstracted images for more than 30 years, using brushy strokes and saturated hues suggestive sometimes of Monet’s mellifluous “Water Lilies” but more often the rude thrashings of de Kooning. His 17 paintings currently at Elizabeth Harris show a continuing predilection for the scenery of upstate New York, Puerto Rico and Newfoundland (though, as always, such specifics must be inferred from the titles, since the paintings evoke poetic rather than topographical spaces). Mr. Bohary’s themes may be consistent, but his working methods seem grabbed from the air. Viewed up close, his colors jar and dislocate; his strokes, which vary from sleek coatings to scattered stabs, usually serve to impart color but at other times superimpose grids and details. There appear to be no habits or even preconceptions of figure/ground relationships or of space, whether intimate or panoramic. By comparison, de Kooning’s conception of space is elegantly consistent. Yet Mr. Bohary’s images have a surprising concreteness. On the whole his compositions expand muscularly against the canvas edges, and their rhythms impart a sense of gravity’s vertical pressure and the resistance of horizontals, His color is non-formulaic, yet specific. Some hues turn unexpectedly neutral to make way for others; some maintain full colorfulness even over hue contrasts of tone. In a painting like “ Cross Country Winter” (2002), a blueish-white horizontal slash at the bottom, turning duller and pinker in its upper portion, conveys the ground plane sliding deeply beneath overhanging trees and a remote sky. Most works here provide fewer toeholds of description. The irregularly drawn grid in “ Sid-City” (2005) might denote either buildings or entire city blocks; in either case it provides a foil for the adamant thrusts of color immediately above: a block of neutral off-white propped by a flaming slash of orange, then a glide of scarlet strokes, abruptly halted by two quick stabs of red and yellow. A singularly brilliant white peers from a higher point made remote by the image’s continuing rhythms. Mr. Bohary’s tireless reworking of the placement and intensity of these forms has conjured a coherent visual event- and the squared, staccato pulses give the impression of “city” in ways that a mere enumeration of detail never could. As for those exotic sounding titles, like “Whale-Blow-Outside” and “Ken-Bali” - suffice it to say that they offer possibilities rather than explanations. In “ Ken-Bali”(2003), color sequences intimate a limpid clearing between the foreground of matted green-blues and more purplish, detailed background masses. A grill-like form might be a structure, while squiggles hint at discrete shrubs. Is “ Ken” that blueish mass shifting across the clearing, or the faint outlines of a large face at center? The artist’s gifts as a storyteller lie in the pictorial rather than the literal, but such is th eloquence of his constructions that this hardly detracts. Perhaps for the artists, too, the literal identities are fragmentary and elusive. The buttery, atmospheric passages of some paintings recall the early work of his onetime teacher Philip Guston, but the similarity ends there: Mr. Guston’s paintings from the 1950s and 1960s seem placid and just slightly nave;-gazing compared top the younger artists’s hunger for external stimuli and his loathing to stand still. Mr. Bohary’s pursuit of expressionism is neither superficially descriptive not indulgently mannered. It represents, in short, a new and personal experience- no small achievement, considering its debt to modern America’s first, and arguably greatest, indigenous art movement.