New Paintings by David Geiser
at Bryant Street Gallery

David Geiser
Spur, 2001
36 x 36 inches

David Geiser loves to be around nature. He goes to his cabin in the woods and he fishes. He likes the fresh water scent and the isolation, the concentration, and the necessity to remain alert. The mist from a river happens through the refraction of light. His paintings are therefore an interpretation of this process of refraction. But it is not at all representational. These panels exist beyond representation. They have a method - a serious investigation of color tones and values, of glazes, subtle pours and drips, even subtler manipulation of linear forms and amorphous shapes caught within the essential stillness of painting.

Geiser wants the work to sing. It does. Look at the earlier "Cenote Series" - the large circles - perhaps reminiscent of early sculpture by Richard Serra. The panels-the parts in relation to the whole-are not incidental to how the painting is structured. They exist of necessity. They are part of what makes the painting significant, what gives the painting its expressive energy. Geiser's work is always on time, always engaged in a process of temporality and transference, transference from the world of nature, the world of eternal struggle, to some wondrous outward manifestation. They are not paintings that project a mood so much as paintings that give vitality and meaning to a world that has (temporarily?) lost its sense of tactile response to the intimate phenomena of everyday life. Geiser's paintings help restore a sense of intimacy to the world-a tall order that only a painter who has a vision can achieve. David Geiser is such a painter.

- Excerpt from essay by Robert C. Morgan

Bryant Street Gallery
520 Bryant Street
Palo Alto, CA 94301
650-321-8155, fax 650-321-8154