STEVEN SORMAN

Since his debut in the early '70s Steven Sorman has built a reputation with, openly decorative mixed-medium works.

Sorman's ornamental predilections have often provoked comparisons with the sensibilities of Matisse and Motherwell, though his work displays an equally strong kinship with Rauschenberg's cooler, "flat bed" organization of pictorial space. Like his accomplished precursors, Sorman has made collage a central part of his artistic practice. In fact, until recently, Sorman's pieces were typically organized around a persistent motif of broken and overlapping technical forays, so that sections of contrasting color were played against translucent scrims, gestural marks and framed areas that often held figural silhouettes or splashed paint placed to calculated affect.

In recent years the tapestried poise of the earliest work has yielded to something more energetic, with Sorman employing wild arabesques to draw together the disparate elements of his compositions. Collaged from handmade paper, sheer drapery, gold leaf and other exotic materials, his works often exude an Oriental sumptuousness.

Sorman applies paint in two distinct manners: on the one hand, he makes use of a thinned out, almost watercolor transparency that bares every splatter and much of the canvas beneath, on the other, he allows himself passages of heavily worked, al- most chalky opacity.

Filled with biomorphic shadows and overlapping lines, this painting evokes a horizonless inner landscape where natural forces reveal themselves with graphic certainty. Private as thought, Sorman's oil proposes a transcendent identity between life's energies, painted gestures and the trace of consciousness. One could say that Sorman's paintings have evolved from ornaments to devotional emblems; a change that bodes well for Sorman's future.