Lilly Wei, Art Critic, Curator of the exhibition Twisting & Turning, Abstract Painting Now, excerpted from the catalog essay. 2003
Frank Stella once said that there are two problems confronting painting; one is to find out what painting is, the other is how to make a painting. The seven painters in this exhibtion, Nate Cassie, Christopher French, Arturo Herrera, John L. Moore, Thomas Nozkowski, Kim Squaglia and Natasha Sweeten (who range in age from their 30s to their 60s), all have further answers to those two questions. One of their responses to what painting is - which makes them a group for the purposes of this exhibition - is that while it may be abstract, it is also referential, the geometric and the figurative merged to create a more elaborated, mannered hybrid. These painters negotiate the once antagonistic divide between abstraction and representation with aplomb, even insouciance. Dedicated to a range of sensuous form and varying degrees of anecdotal content, each artist, in his or her distinctive way, offers a critique of modernist formalism.
New York artist John L. Moore continues to elaborate on his theme of mirrors and water in his recent paintings. Like Herrera, he is interested in modernism and popular culture although his work is less mediated and refined. There is an aspect of roughed-up Pop in his style, his sketchy, schematized imagery forcefully blunt, his painting technique spontaneous and expressive. Scaled to his height - Moore's signature format is 80 x 67" - his canvases contain enigmatic ovoid shapes he calls mirrors, floating on the surface as if on water. However, they are blank, reflecting whatever the viewer might bring to them. These mirrors can also be read as eyes or openings into the painting, holes in the fabric of illusion, personal and impersonal witnesses, implicating perception and events: how we see, what we see, if we see. His palette, always restricted to a few colors, blooms brilliantly red in this selection. His fields waver like fire or water, like the bloodied seas of the middle passage. They also have the look of curtains that divide the fictive from the real. Of his abstractions, Moore says, read them anyway you want.