| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I am pleased to invite all those interested in art as a dynamic force, to view my
portfolio.
It is no coincidence that in the study and history of man, ART plays the dominant role. Painting need not be literal to tell a story. Here are some words from an art historian of distinction, known for his knowledge of Abstract Expressionism.
"Amid the number of participants of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940's and 1950's, Vincent Pepi produced a significant body of serious, distinctive and visionary work.
"As ongoing research enriches the already remarkable story of mid-20th-century painterly abstraction in America, Vincent Pepi's vital, vibrant oeuvre of small-scale gestures and spatial inventiveness offers a timely reminder that much remains to be appreciated anew.
"It is Pepi's exploration of such semi-illusionistic abstract phenomena, at times evoking a nearly palpable though fluctuant sense of space, that comprises an intriguing personal deviation from the American Abstract Expressionist norm, so often given to the pursuit of the flatness of form and color. Pepi understood that the shifting levels of cubist space, no matter how slight, held formal potential for extension into more emphatically abstract imagery of gestural abstraction."
Excerpts from 1992 exhibit catalogue essay;
"Space and Gesture: The paintings of Vincent Pepi"
by Jeffrey Wechsler, Assistant Director, Zimmerli Art Museum,
.
Here is another comment on Pepi by Harry Rand;
Vincent Pepi like other "first generation Abstract Expressionists
never lost his grounding in manual virtuosity and drew incessantly
from still lives and nudes, and, as in other first generation Abstract Expressionists, the residue of this surety of line and form
elevates his art,as its absence can be felt as a hollowness in subsequent abstract art. In a calligrific work such as (<525-f),1950,
the sense of the brush stroke's conviction and certitude would be
lacking in American art for the next two generations as artists groped for any tenet to rebut camp's faithlessness. Then Pepi used
his enamel-loaded brush with the assurance of a writer conscripting
letters or a draftsman outlining an apple. Untethered from hard-won
form, Pepi's color roamed free chromatically. If his work recalls Gorky and deKooning, wwith flourishes of others, Pepi is very much
an individual, with a consistency which courses through all his
works, right into (Eclipse/Kiss,<657),1981, a richly painted oil, redolent of certain lyrical deKoonings of thirty years earlier without
in any way emulating him.
|
|
|
