mitch glassman art

“Art is optimistic when it recognizes the insurmountable problem. The task is to step back from our ordered world and recognize the possibilities. For this artist, the challenge has been discerned in the nature of silence and how that unfolds in time and space; and how by serendipity it may offer insight.   If minimalism aims at doing more with less… and less, than further still there is the pursuit of absolute silence. Silence may not have voice but in the artist’s mind it does have language, gesture, timeless text. Mitch Glassman’s mark making has evolved into a script coined marcography; a semantic coding of existential relationships; a silent dialogue revealing relationships in nature, science, poetry and prose; offering an intense affect that may bridge the gap between perceived irreconcilable differences.   If there is truth in the notion (paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze ) that Humans territorialize themselves through language, then pre-constructed language deterritorializes us; no longer controllable or recognizable, taking us beyond temporality… revealing the potential of language and cultures to encounter and create, rather than reinforce already constituted forms.  The artist spent several months in the Middle East working with Palestinian and Israeli artists during the Intifada (2002), and in China and Tibet (1998), during the efforts of cultural genocide, demonstrating an open system of language which transcends nation identity. The abstract nature of the mark making (marcography) drew each culture to the work as if it were a trace of their own and in recognition of an insurmountable problem.  ”