John Tursi

The artist who comes closest to genius status here is John Tursi, whose scroll-like drawings cover the walls of a large double-height gallery. They dazzle. Using mostly the shapes of triangles, French curves and other drafting tools, Mr. Tursi has devised a vocabulary at once organic and geometric that sustains endless variations. With it, he has created a universe of acrobats engaged in all kinds of intimate acts that remain more engaging for their decorative power than their naughtiness. These figures evoke the coiled energy and perfection of Indian art--specifically the erotic intertwinings of temple sculpture and the saturated palette of Indian miniature painting.

—Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2002

In this series of lozenge paintings from 2010, Tursi pushes the boundaries of figuration, intimacy, and spatial logic. His compositions are immediate and commanding: stylized figures rendered in high-contrast palettes en- gage in tangled, ambiguous encounters, their gestures caught between play and provocation.

At the core of Tursi’s visual language is the body, not as a singular, stat- ic form, but as a repeated motif, fractured and reassembled. Looping arms, stretched torsos, and faces flattened into expressive shapes empha- size rhythm over realism. These curving silhouettes appear and reappear across the canvases, generating an experience that feels almost hypnoti- cally musical. Tursi’s approach of using flat, unmodulated color and a sin- gular colored background removes a sense of physical depth. Rather than occupying a defined setting, the characters float and overlap, tangled in ways that suggest intimacy amongst chaos.

Tursi’s decision to orient each canvas as a diagonal reinforces the compo- sition’s fluidity and invites viewers to reassess the way they engage with both image and space; in this sense Tursi is both a modern Michelangelo and Mondrian. But Tursi’s world is distinctly his own: raw, exacting, and utterly resistant to narrative closure.