Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Jonathan Santlofer
American (b. 1946)
ROMANTIC CRIMINAL (1984)
pastel on paper
46 3/4" x 32 1/2"

STYLE: biomorphic,
abstraction

 ©Jonathan Santlofer

Jonathan Santlofer has long been considered one of the contemporary era's most interesting and most underrated painters. In works which employ vibrant color, sensuality, and drama, Santlofer grounds all of his works, including the "abstract" paintings, in recognizable references. The work is multilayered and complex, both formally and in its narrative themes. The artist has called his 80s paintings "my so-called abstracts." Recently, Santlofer has completed a series of portraits of other artists—prompted by a residency in Rome, where he became interested in art historical subject matter. The change in direction was inspired by tragedy—all of his work was destroyed in a gallery fire in 1989, immediately prior to the Rome residency.

Santlofer has also achieved some renown in the literary world with a 2002 thriller entitled The Death Artist. The book contains many in-jokes about the contemporary art world and its politics, as well as a lurid plot.

Santlofer has had one-person exhibitions at Graham Modern Gallery, NY; Galleria Peccolo, Livorno, Italy; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Betsy Rosenfield and Klein Gallery, Chicago, IL; as well as numerous group exhibitions. His work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Deborah Perlberg, Arts magazine, 10/82
"Santlofer's paintings are part of that body of work that will be looked at and discussed long after the smoke has cleared from today's battles over the "new" art...abstraction is probably the most 20th century expression of all our art forms...His paintings are in the realist tradition because they are full of essential elements—narrative and gesture, the action of forms moving through space—and full of their own history—every form and line coming from a certain place and heading somewhere else through a landscape alternatively deep and darkly mysterious, and translucent and penetrable. "
Elizabeth Frank, catalog, Pam Adler Gallery, 1983
"It is the Western tradition of painting which provides the principle context for Santlofer's work. In his willingness to imply the flat and rounded in terms of each other, he has enlisted himself in the ongoing dialectic between the literal and the illusionistic that continues to feed the modernist stream. Moreover, he shares affinities with two modern painters—Leger and O'Keefe—who define organic forms, as he does, with tactile silhouettes and yet consistently affirm the flatness and abstraction. He shares, then, their willful illogic, although his sensibility—immediate, joyous, bold and tender—is entirely his own. His new paintings appear to be all surface, openness and sweeping, voluptuous movement, but they also draw the viewer toward a concealed, inexhaustible and steadily pulsing interior."
Ronnie Cohen, ARTFORUM, 2/87
"Since the early 80s. Jonathan Santlofer has used abstraction's objective face to uncover its hidden subjective side...the shaped relief canvases of a few years ago were notable for aggressive appearances that made them seem to explode off the wall...Santlofer's paintings encourage their audience not so much to see them in the usual perceptual terms but rather to experience them in a psychic sense..."Behold" is a word that aptly describes the nature of the response that occurs when abstract art, whether painting or sculpture, becomes something more than what meets the eye...colored planes and cyclonic lines that seem in a perpetual state of disclosure, reaping a pictorial whirlwind with keen expressive benefits."

Gerrit Henry, ARTnews, 3/84
"They remind us of idealized human organs: hearts, livers and kidneys, all polished to a high shine and compressed together in one painting...The works exult in their biomorphic abstractionism even as they seem to have figurative meaning...Santlofer has recently been influenced by Kabuki, an art that may seem a far cry from his work...equal parts imagination and ...sensibility, even Oriental sensibility"