The Joys of Sacrifice

Consider that a sparrow might also be an agglomeration of shapes. At first, it might not be the most appealing idea. Sparrows, after all, are living things. As such, they enjoy a right not to be reduced to the sum of their parts. Alone the bird's physical neural vastness provides a sufficient disincentive, to thinking of it as some kind of living, breathing, flying geometric puzzle. So you'd be justified to refuse the suggestion, to think the bird in this way. Unless you'd been paying attention to Dylan Solomon Kraus's paintings of the last fifteen years. In this body of work, there is a small canvas depicting a bird, perched on an outstretched branch, against a night sky. Two lines signal the bird's breakdown into form. Both begin where the creature's back meets its neck. Both then drop down, swooping away from one another. From there, they describe the divisions between neck and breast, torso and wing. The bird flits towards naturalism. But its movement in that direction is curtailed by a stylistic gambit, which transforms the richness of feather into something smoother, like porcelain. In turn, transitions from shadow to light resemble dispersions of dust. The painting, like all of Kraus's work, games natural vision. Seeing, these pictures remind us, is always an act of interpretation.