This
March Safe-T-Gallery will be celebrating the distinctive landscape
of the northern New Jersey with “Salvaged” -- a series
of remarkable oil paintings by the American landscape artist Valeri
Larko. “Salvaged” is the result of more than five years
of painting, on site, in the junkyards of northern New Jersey. The
show will open with a reception for the artist on March 2nd, from
6 to 8 PM , and will continue through April 1.
Ms Larko brings an authoritative, very American style to all her work.
The paintings in “Salvaged” were painted mostly on the
grounds of the Kucharski Salvage Yard in Hackettstown, New Jersey.
The overt subjects of the paintings are piles of late-20th century
recyclable junk, old cars, appliances and other objects of rather lesser
known provenance. But unlike many other artists who use discarded items
in their work, Larko does not thrust these hulks out at the viewer
as a provocative, moralistic or dada-istic challenge. There are no
glaring juxtapositions. It is almost as if we are back home with the
country-cousins who never really had a chance at being “ready-made,” and
never even knew they could be part of a “combine.” We feel
at home, there is a pleasant light, there is often a blue sky with
puffy clouds, and there is no reason in the world not to enjoy the
way paint and rust and metal shimmer in the early summer air.
The imagery is a critical part of Larko’s paintings, raising
political, economic and ecological questions, but because of her shear
mastery of paint, the artistic issues on her canvas carry equal weight.
The large, flat sides of the white appliances become wondrous rectangles
of melded of blue and grey. A crumpled, rusty, aqua-colored car hood,
becomes a bristling study in contrast, hue and depth. (The artist’s
insistence on painting en plein aire, on even her largest canvases,
is explained here.) Larko’s paintings become both rich, 21st
century, memento-mori as well as vibrant celebrations of vision, art
and life.
Ms Larko’s work has been exhibited at many venues, and is viewed
daily by thousands of commuters as they pass through the Secaucus Transfer
Station of New Jersey Transit, where her large-scale murals of the
New Jersey railroad landscape grace the north mezzanine. Her work is
included in many corporate, museum and private collections, notably
the Montclair Museum, the Jersey City Museum, the Johnson and Johnson
Collection and the collection of Rutgers University.
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