James Klyman-Mowczan

New geometric paintings by Vancouver artist James Klyman-Mowczan will be on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery until May 28. Klyman-Mowczan uses acrylic and modelling paste on board to create precise, geometric images on roughly textured surfaces. His current palette, which developed in the early 1980s, consists of what he calls “industrial or new design” colours — phthalo blue, phthalo green, cadmium red deep, bright solid yellow — primarily unmixed.

Klyman-Mowczan’s intense, eloquent paintings are a thoughtful contribution to the continuing discourse on the role of abstraction in contemporary art. Set apart from the Neo-Geo movement, related to though not replicating the developments of the Modernists of the 1960s, his work uses essential forms from the language of painting — the square, the circle, the triangle — to probe the intuitive, the subconscious and the unknown. To Klyman-Mowczan, these are the three basic forms in nature “…the square is reduced to the vertical and horizontal, the circle to the curve, the triangle to the diagonal. The vertical and horizontal incise space and stretch time, the curve contemplates itself, the diagonal traverses surface.”