Mark Innerst, New Paintings [Exhibition Catalogue, Kasmin Gallery, Oct. 9 - Nov. 8, 2003] - Softcover

40 pp., essay by Nathan Kernan, 13 color plates, exhibition checklist. In his most recent paintings Mark Innerst continues to explore imagery of New York City, and also introduces new, and rediscovered, subject matter into his work, in paintings of amusement parks and expansive, shoreline landscapes. In contrast to many of Innerst's earlier New York City paintings, which could be described as romantically Luminist or overtly celebratory, the new ones, often of the Times Square area, tend to view the city as a complicated, almost bewildering mosaic of signs, symbols and flags. What Innerst calls the city's sometimes intimidating "fullness and density and scale" are evoked in the collage-like complexity of a painting like Island, or the visual cacophony of All New Buildings (both 2003). Innerst's extraordinary painting technique, employing layers of pooled, lacquer-like acrylic, stills the city's transience and speed to create highly-burnished objects of contemplation. For the past year or so Innerst has been living part-time in Cape May, N.J., not far from Wildwood amusement park, a relic of classic 60s Americana. Some of Innerst's most exciting new paintings depict the giant Ferris wheel there, a structure as formally surprising and heroic as any abstract sculpture. Innerst's sun-struck Ferris wheels turn into fantastic armatures of light and implied motion, suggesting feelings of freedom and abandon, (subtly tinged with the anxiety these bring), as much as they unselfconsciously connote the temporality of sunflowers, or Phaeton's chariot itself.