In The Mist of a Great Fall: The Niagara Paintings

Curtis Anthony Bozif

In this, his third solo-exhibition, Curtis Anthony Bozif broadens the scope of his recent work, informed by environments of the Great Lakes, to include the falls at Niagara. This new series of large-scale abstractions, rooted in observation and in place, assay tone and the prismatic color spectrum. Moreover, they disrupt the idea that landscape, as such, is static, even material. Indeed, the supposed permanence of landscape here becomes an opalescent memorial to a world continually undone by geologic forces: plate tectonics, volcanism, earthquakes, glaciation, erosion, sedimentation, and in just the last two hundred years, the gradual increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the anthropogenic burning of fossil hydrocarbons. In these processes of decrease and increase, of dissipation and concentration, and transformations by repeated subtraction and addition, Bozif sees an analogue to the act of painting itself. As he embraces the challenge of interpreting what was once seen as the quintessential subject of American landscape painting, his diaphanous curtains of pigment and light test the very limits of the genre and its conventions. 

Image: Niagara, Number 5 (detail), 2022, oil on canvas, 70 x 45"