Shimon Okshteyn: Brushstroke, 2003

“Okshteyn’s works, whatever their medium, tread a fine line between representa­tion and abstraction, veering more to the latter the closer one looks.”  ___ Donald Kuspit, New York

“Okshteyn examines something that is not so much an object as it is an idea: the brush stroke, the universal symbol of  the vocabulary of Painting. The paradoxical nature of this inquiry creates an intriguing ambiguity. Before he can make his hyper-real drawings of brush strokes, the artist first has to create them. By turning thick impasto paint into thin graphite drawing, he creates an illusion of a third dimension. What we are seeing is a disorienting vision of heavy paint applied thickly, which, upon close examination, turns out to be thin gray varnish. In another twist, heavy impasto paint strokes, often associated with primary colors, are painstakingly translated into a gray scale utilizing graphite rubbed into the canvas.”  ___Tova Beck-Friedman, New York