In Steven Seinberg’s work, voices and natural forms are muffled; submerged beneath the surface, pushing towards the viewer as sound against air through water to be heard. The elusive organic imagery of Seinberg’s paintings emerge from his attempt to find place in the world, to see the macroscopic in the microscopic—life in a river and the inevitable interconnection between coexistent systems in a large ecology.
Karina Noel Hean
Sante Fe, New Mexico
March 2011
Inertia is an impossibility…in a life, in a river, in a painting. Steven Seinberg’s paintings imply that motion is incessant and loss inevitable. While the desire for rest propels and holds us, it is only a temporary possibility from which we proceed and to which we progress. Embracing vagueness, Seinberg paints translucent space in layers of colorful grays occupied by indefinable elements in brief states of buoyancy, suspension, and sometimes tumult. As a cycle of paintings, the work produced from 2004-2011 reflects a key feature of a river’s ecosystem—the persistence of similar change.
Seinberg’s somber paintings evolve from and update the work of mid-twentieth century American Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Cy Twombly, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, from the perspective of a twenty-first century American. The action that occurs in the openness of his large canvases is witness to a heightened sensitivity, nostalgia, and humility grounded in a spirituality of natural phenomena. While the exploration of format and media clearly engage Seinberg, as they did his predecessors, they do so largely to serve his investigation of how the life of a river flows and unfolds.
As they are intuitively developed, the paintings reveal the history of their process. The canvases seem witness to lengthy pondering and reflection, interrupted by momentarily decisive attacks; they capture a kind of time and volume. Indeed, the action of how marks and brushstrokes are made is at the core of Seinberg’s subject matter. The work displays an affinity for chance and embraces the materiality of his preferred media: graphite and thin washes of oil paint. Drips, smears, and translucency create a powerfully sparse space and offer quiet visual anchors in the nebulous fields of Seinberg’s surfaces.