Studio Visit: KAZIMIRA RACHFAL

Kazimira Rachfal, studio wall w/ group of black paintings

It is always an exciting privilege to visit another artist's studio, to see work in progress, or finished work that has never been shown, and an environment that reflects working and thinking processes. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Kazimira Rachfal in the fantastic Soho studio she shares with her husband, painter Eric Holzman and their son. Eric was savvy enough to acquire this loft in the late '70s, just before the real estate boom priced these classic spaces out of reach of most artists. In addition to being extremely warm and generous people, Kazimira and Eric are dedicated hard working painters doing wonderful work.

Kazimira Rachfal's recent paintings are intimate in scale, and highly sensuous in their humble materiality. Working with an endless variety of simple geometric configurations, she goes about creating delicately layered surfaces and finely intuited relations among colors, shapes, edges and planes. Thin veils of oil paint are applied, scraped, dripped to form subtly colored accumulations with an equilibrium that is slightly askew, and always unified by the richness of the surface and the focus of a simple dynamic relation. In one area of her studio, Kazimira has collected various small bits of paper and fragments found on the street, each an example of the sort of integral happenstance that she notices in the world, and which she values as a source of release from convention. Indeed that release from convention is a key element in the resonance of Kazimira's work, in her dedicated mindful search for direct experience, and in the dialogue that occurs between the intensity of her intent and the apparent offhandedness of her process. She repeatedly achieves a plain-spoken visual poetry that is disarming in its simplicity, and in its beauty.

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 10 x 8 inches

(sorry I do not have titles for these paintings -- and all dimensions are approximate)

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 10 x 10 inches

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 14 x 11 inches

Kazimira Rachfal, studio wall

Kazimira Rachfal, oil on canvas, about 8 x 10 inches

Here is a view of Eric's studio space where he is finishing paintings for a show that will open November 21 at Sideshow in Brooklyn. More on that later.

Eric Holzman, studio view w/ new paintings & firetruck

Thank you Kazimira and Eric for a lovely visit.