NY Curator's Review

One of my commission paintings made the top 50 finalists in an international art competition hosted by the New York City Art Marathon and also ended up being the third most voted-for piece of the competition. The painting – entitled Powerful – was created based on my client’s décor and stands tall in their living room at 6 feet wide x 6 feet tall.

The New York Art Marathon is an international art competition, which offers its 10 finalists the opportunity to participate in a group show in New York City. Powerful was chosen among over 600 entries that came from across the globe.

The curator and juror for the NY ART MARATHON Spring 2011 is David Gibson, a well-known NY art critic and curator who has curated numerous shows all over the United States. It was actually the first time that my art got reviewed by someone like Mr. Gibson and I’m really happy and thankful for his reviews which you can read below.

Matt LeBlanc ”Powerful”, 2010, acrylic on 2 large canvases. , 6 x 6 feet

“Powerful” by Matt LeBlanc is an abstract painting, a symbolic abstraction. We can see the shapes of buildings in a big city and its’ reflections in the water. These buildings also look like power or volume bars. They stand out on that background, rising above the horizon. You can almost feel them trying to reach higher, to get stronger, you can feel this movement in the reflections because they are slightly different as if they captured buildings’ positions from a second ago.

Matt LeBlanc ”Beyond”, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 48 in.

Another painting is called “Beyond”. On one hand, it has the qualities of de Kooning with all the gesturing and the washes, and on the other hand it has qualities of Mark Rothko – the layering, the color and the contrast of visual areas. It is compelling because the artist limits the palette to browns, ochres and off-white colors. It looks like a process of starting with darker colors and adding to them so they end up getting lighter, changing and merging. The metaphor is a metaphysical relationships between the onlooker and the artist in which we are meant to look into the work and beyond.

Matt LeBlanc ”Simplicity”, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in.

One more work – “Simplicity” – looks like a gestural signature written over a dividing line between dark and light areas. Dark area is completely dark, and light area has a lot of gesture in it, it looks like a piece of marble that has been scored by a cutting knife. The gesture is reminiscent of the signatures from the 18th or 19th century legal documents like the Declaration of Independence. It is a signature that is impossible to read, a mystery of simplicity.

- David Gibson, the juror and curator for the New York Art Marathon