Don Zurlo
“The Inconstant Illusion”
September 14 - October 2, 2010
Reception Thursday, September 16, 4-7 PM
Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present new work by the artist, Don Zurlo. Entitled “The Inconstant Illusion”, the exhibition of paintings opens Tuesday, September 14 and extends through Saturday, October 2 with a reception Thursday, September 16th, 4-7 PM. Throughout his art career, Zurlo’s paintings have always been in a constant state of change, morphing from one style into another, but always attempting to express the transient, random, and unpredictable events in the human landscape in which both animate and inanimate objects continuously interact in a state of flux. Fascinated with eastern philosophy while in college, he continued throughout college and in later years experimenting with ambiguous visual images. Working with black and white torn paper collages in an art class under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers, Zurlo presented bold images of organic forms that existed in an ambiguous state of figure/ground tension. In the following years he experimented with more complex imagery and techniques attempting to reflect the continual change in contemporary life and perceptions. In the current exhibition, he has abandoned all of these techniques, returning to a minimalist approach in which ambiguity is presented through simple acrylic images resembling the torn paper compositions of his student years at Rutgers. Still philosophical however, his paintings echo his view of reality for he states, “In many ways form is an illusion - our interpretation of an infinite variety of relationships between fields of energy. In our search for meaning, our minds create images from these forces, filling in voids in our perception from the vast library of our personal impressions and experiences.” In addition to studying with Allan Kaprow as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, he worked with Robert Watts in the graduate fine arts program at Douglas College where he earned his MFA Degree. The artist taught at both South Carolina State University and Allen University in South Carolina and now is a full time artist. If you would like further information or photographs, please contact the gallery.