Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Jedd Garet
American (b. 1955)
CURTAIN OF PROTECTION (1980)
acrylic on canvas
73" x 57"
STYLE: Neo-expressionism

The raw, discordant colors and mysterious symbolism of Curtain of Protection evoke an eerie disquiet on the part of the viewer. Something is wrong in this picture, but what is it? The dark central figure, twisting and turning in a waterfall of garish red acrylic, seems threatened, but by whom? Why is protection necessary? The ominous questions and moods that Garet's paintings raise are typical of many works from the Neo-Expressionist movement, a style which germinated in the 70s and came to full flower in the 80s. Neo-Expressionism is marked by a concern with gesture, color, and apocalyptic subject matter, inasmuch as such generalities can describe a very diverse era in painting. Garet, like many other young painters of his generation, is looking to the physical qualities of paint to transform emotional statements into color and movement. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th century, he doesn't mind using recognizable figures to do so. The implied violence of Curtain of Protection is the most perplexing aspect of the painting. Is the figure in danger? Or is it all a witty pretense?

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Maurice Poirier, ARTnews, 4/86
"His appropriation of modes and motifs from de Chirico especially, together with the glaring mannerist quality of his color, is still in evidence...Garet's greatest talent may well lie in landscape and seascape, and few artists know how to exploit the raw radiance latent in acrylic with as much poetic flair."

John Zinnser, Art in America, 9/89
"Jedd Garet...is an artist for whom subtlety has never been the issue...His earliest works were rendered in macho swirls of acrylic impasto. For all their reckless speed and abandon, the paintings managed to look like instant masterpieces—classicism with a raffish downtown spirit. In them, Garet borrowed freely from Giorgio de Chirico, especially his images of a psychologically charged landscape inhabited by solitary, mannequinlike figures."
Nancy Grimes, ARTnews, 12/87
"During the early 80s Jedd Garet brought into the mainstream a style or school of art that looked purposely inept. 'Bad' artists favored awkward, childish drawing, off-balance composition, discordant color, and slapdash paint application. Neo-Expressionism represented the Golden Age of Bad. In this selection of recent paintings, Garet brings badness to biomorphic abstraction, proving that he is one of the best bad artists around. By denying expectations of balance, unity, and harmony, Garet unerringly achieves a disquieting offness—am eerie sense that the natural, automatic processes of psyche and soma celebrated by Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism have gone awry...Garet's incredibly studied paintings burlesque the notions of spontaneity and naturalness that have generated so much modern abstraction. Without completely discarding the category of the natural, he suggests that the nature of nature has yet to be determined."

Donald Kuspit, ARTFORUM, 11/87
"Garet works in a mode that might be called surreal-baroque abstract, with a touch of rococo potential...What garet gives us is a baroque sense of imperfect visionary flight on a surrealist base—a sense of incongruous forms mysteriously converging, inhabiting the same pictorial space for no apparent reason...his paintings are full of pathos tending to violence, distilled into a witty, but nonetheless extreme pictorial gesture...The final effect in ornamental in the best sense:...a playful network of light and shade, conveying a sense of emotional peculiarity and sinuousness."