Art Review on Color Field Paintings by Gary M. Dault

These remarkable new paintings by Eric Klemm — precipitously born in the wake of a lifetime of making virtuoso photographs–are utterly exhilarating in the degree to which they sidle up teasingly close to formal rigidity and then, before any such damage can occur, subvert all expectations of any such programming. The new paintings trade in an exciting new compositional integrity, evinced by a decision to make square (almost square) paintings built upon a surprisingly innovative pairing of curved angles that answer and echo across Klemm’s immaculate picture planes. His bright, hard colour is a pauseless delight here as well, employed with such an authoritative expressiveness that a buoyant painting like his Yellow, Green and red Angle, for example, seems — despite their evident constructivist kinship– to bear little affinity to a stricter, less effervescent work like his strict Two Black Angles on White. All of these new Eric Klemms are like highly efficient engines: whatever the vitality he built into them, you get a hundred times that energy coming back to you.

Gary Michael Dault, former art critic of The Globe& Mail, Toronto, May 30, 2018

Eric Klemm Artist