Shan Buddha,titanium white,ivory.oil on canvas 50x60 inches, '08

To describe what Roni Stretch does with his art is difficult to put into words. What I can tell you is that when Canvas was a dream nearing completion, Roni Stretch looked at our dry-walled concept in the making, trusted our vision and committed to being a part of it. Roni Stretch was one of the first artist to show at Canvas in our art debut, and we were blessed by his work.

Stretch’s paintings are meditational exercises. Their perfectionism is at once spiritual and technical: the realization of perfect consciousness–and all art is ultimately about states of consciousness–and the seamless integration of figure and ground that symbolizes it.

The eureka moment of “re-cognition”– the instant we become conscious of the image within the inscrutable surface, as though it was some hallucinatory projection of our own (the moment when we are inside the painting not simply contemplating it from the outside, a “seeing in” )–is the classic moment of enlightenment. (words of Donald Kuspit)

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