Messengers: A Solo Exhibition

Georgia O’Keefe once said, “I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the truck and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.”  O’Keefe, like Arthur Dove, abstracted motifs from nature, but this quote provides a deeper insight into the spiritual connection between her affinity with nature and the human ego as she describes the heavens framing the anthropomorphic, natural image. It is this very orientation to life, artistic expression and exemplary skill that makes Kyle Andrew Szpyrka so important to contemporary art.  As Kyle says, “The infinity of the world around us is a mirror of the infinity within us. My work as an artist and my sense of safety comes through my attempts to embrace and know this infinity on an intimate level through honest searching and acceptance of all that I find in the deepest and farthest places of both my inner and outer worlds. For me, it is the infinite peace that comes through realizing our own interconnectedness on all scales of existence."
 
Kyle’s abstract work with pencil on watercolor paper begins with the intricate root system of O’Keefe’s tree but, in a process of discovery, transcends the natural image to the human and again to the abstract spiritual. Soon the image begins to twist in on itself and then outward into ephemeral bands surrounding intricate and astounding forms that accelerate in motion, some of which take on anatomical similarities.
 
The emotions and meaning behind the abstracts then becomes tangible but not quite direct in his figurative work. Figures with a “lightness of being” are suspending, and like an Escher painting, refuse to disclose from neither where they originated nor where they are headed. They are categorically inspiring and beautiful.

-Paul Calendrillo, Paul Calendrillo New York