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Marty MaehrCHARESTLight seems to pour through the surfaces of Marty Maehr’sgorgeous paintings. The sun itself features in many of hisworks, and even when it doesn’t his subjects seem to give offa light from within. At first glance, it would be easy to mistakehis brightly colored canvases for stained-glass windows.Blocks of glowing colors are hemmed in by bold black lines,creating mosaics that seem to transform oil paint into jewellikepieces of glass. Maehr shows an impressive ability tomix his colors so that they give off a realistic depiction oflight and its effects. Even when his compositions are at theirmost abstract, they have a palpably physical presence. Thereis also a strong sense of a spirituality that goes beyond thenormal associations of stained-glass with religious subjects.Night skies, flowing water and abstract patterns are all givenan otherworldly radiance that lifts them into a spiritual realm.Yet in some ways these glorious images are not at all whatthe viewer would expect from a stained-glass window. Mostnotably, Maehr’s images have a powerful sense of movement.He vividly communicates the feel of rushing water currents orof wind moving across a landscape, as well as charting theflow of energy in inner, psychological domains. A student ofthe Bible and the Tao Te Ching as well as of philosophers fromEmerson to Plato, Maehr shows himself to be a perceptiveinterpreter of both interior and exterior worlds.www.maehrcreations.netwww.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/Marty_Maehr.aspxWaterfall of Light Oil on Canvas 37” x 24”Tapis RougeAcrylic on Canvas 30” x 15”To call CHAREST’s luxurious paintings of apples, cherriesand other fruits ‘still lifes’ is to underestimate what is goingon beneath their glowing surfaces. There is a Surrealist feelto these paintings, a slight but fascinating distortion of thereal world’s contours. The pieces of fruit he depicts assumea near-human degree of presence in the spaces they occupy.A viewer would not be surprised to see one of the pears orapples in these paintings start to move, making an active claimfor our attention.Yet despite the voluptuous physical appearance of his subjects,CHAREST, who lives and works in Montreal, does not paintthem from life. Instead, he keeps their “figurative authenticity,”but not their realism. The shapes of the natural world areturned into a fantasy, one that lets the artist open the door toan investigation of “men and women, neighbors, strangers andeven intruders.” There is a sense of drama here, of objectsstepping outside their boundaries. The background againstwhich those objects appear has a deep, many-layered qualityas well, a quality he achieves through the frottis technique, inwhich paints are blended on the canvas itself, rather than ona palette. The resulting colors are simultaneously rich, somberand luminous. Super-saturating our senses at all levels,CHAREST’s paintings depict a world in which realism is whatone makes of it.www.artgcharest.comwww.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/Charest.aspx34 ARTisSpectrum