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Form As Meaning, The Paintings of Mark LaRiviere
                                                      by Peter Pinchbeck

Mark LaRiviere's new paintings are swirling compositions of light and color that bears an unashamed debt to Impressionism. The differences, however, are as pertinent as the similarities; Mark has taken the Impressionist brushstroke and magnified it, giving greater volume and presence to a technique designed to catch momentary effects of light.

For Cézanne, as is well documented, the problem with Impressionism was its dissolution, or dematerialization, of form; he wanted to make of Impressionism "something solid and lasting." Mark has not only found a way of giving greater structure to Impressionism but by the process of abstraction has removed its dependence on a specific temporal situation. Originally a figurative painter, Mark has moved progressively toward the abstract, the removal of literal reference.

Like many of his contemporaries, he is grappling with an issue that also beset Cézanne: how to give form, rather than the mere representation of form (the object, figure or landscape). Abstract Expressionism brought the gesture to a painterly surface, but the particular structures of Pollock and de Kooning were not directed toward the issues of volume and depth. As the critic Adam Gopnik aptly put it, "Abstraction can only genuflect to de Kooning: it can't build on him." Gesture itself does not constitute a vocabulary of form.

As the work of Mark and other abstractionists decisively indicates, painting must reexamine past modes of expression in order to explore their potential for abstract imagery. The Cubist movement offers one example of how such a return to the past can be accomplished in the way it reverted to traditional modeling and somber color (in contrast to Fauvism). Likewise, contemporary abstraction with its openness to the past and its freedom from the restrictions of a specific program or agenda has the ability to infinitely absorb a variety of modes. The only truly dead ends, where closure manifests itself are the minimal (the reduction to blankness and objectness) and the decorative (the reduction to pleasing or beautiful effects).

Paintings like Mark's evoke the "intoxication of form" (Nietzsche) while denying the constrictions of formalism and by this feat disclaims those critics who never cease to fantasize the death of painting. As for abstraction being in a state of crisis, it will always be in a state of crisis: it goes with the turf. If it were trying to do something simplistic, there would be no crisis; nor can it conform to the beauraucratic edict that art should provide socially useful commentary. On the contrary, it desires to point away from what T.S. Eliot called the "panorama of chaos and futility of modern life." It seeks otherness, to create a window onto what has no obvious face, no literal vista, no repressed identity. Like the proverbial prophet in the wilderness, it searches for visions beyond the known, and visions are, after all, the very stuff of which paintings are made.

Peter Pinchbeck February 1995

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Paintings 
               National Arts Club February, 1996

"Huddled presences seem to body forth out of LaRiviere's Guston-like manipulation of paint, asserting themselves in clear hues against surroundings of subdued tones. These presences hover on the edge of existence, on the verge of being reabsorbed into the richly worked surface, enigmas quietly provoking insoluble questions.

No painting is as pure as purists would have it, but my idea of "pure" painting is when it says things that can only or best be said in paint and when it reaches the mind through the delectation of the eye."

Martica Sawin 1995

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Mark LaRiviere Bowery Gallery Show, May 1990
                                                                  by Tom Savage

Said Willem DeKooning, "I think that if an artist can always title his works, that mean he is not always clear." The paintings of Mark LaRiviere are usually untitled and clear. LaRiviere's paintings are composed of numbers and large blocks of colors. Sometimes the blocks are wider than they are long.

Abstract paintings always ask me whether or not I have the right to see in them forms recognizable to me. In one very abstract painting, I see the Manhattan skyline with one of the two rivers attached to it and one boat. Paintings are like rivers, except that they don't move.

Because they move the paintings of Mark LaRiviere are not at all like mirrors. Each time you look in a mirrors you see approximately the same thing. Thus abstract paintings move without moving. For as long as your cerebral and optical neurons keep pulsing, you can see something completely different each time you look at an abstract painting.

Some people think abstract painting is very cold- that is, unmoving. They should be locked in a room with the paintings of Guido Reni if they want "cold." This is Mark LaRiviere's first show at the Bowery Gallery I was very moved.

Tom Savage, Cover Magazine May 1990

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Paint and Possibilities 
Public Securities Association Art Showcase VI, January 1996
                                                   by Meredith Bergman

In LaRiviere's oils, brilliant colors are wedged together into turbulent, fuzzy patchwork between more blended or muted areas, suggesting masses of blazing autumn foliage between earth and sky. In some, his sketchy, urgent strokes take on a windblown diagonal rhythm, yet his paintings are clearly under his control. He seems to be drawing a lovely analogy between the deliberately constructed shimmer of a pieced-glass mosaic and the glistening tossing of an autumnal hillside, animated by an energy that seams to have its own intent.

Meredith Bergman

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Mark LaRiviere Individuals Gallery, March 1988
                                                   by Gerrit Henry

"Mark LaRiviere showed six paintings, abstractions based on New York City, but certainly not limited to it. His color recalled both the Fauves and the Abstract Expressionists; his brushstroke was broad and generous, making for watery fiery representations of the city as refined and revived through one artists sensibilities."

Gerrit Henry ARTnews April 1988

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