About the artist:

"It is always heartening to watch a gifted artist come into possession of his full powers, as has been the case over the last half decade with the Texas painter, Truman Marquez, whose progress this writer has been monitoring since 1997, when Marquez first became a formidable presence on the New York exhibition scene. From the beginning, Marquez has displayed an ambition as large as the state he hails from and a vision to match. The point to which the art of Truman Marquez has evolved can be seen in his powerful new solo show of recent work at Montserrat Gallery, 584 Broadway, from January 2 to 20. But in order to trace his trajectory to the triumph of the present moment it behooves one to take a brief glance backward and examine some of his sources.

First, it is important to acknowledge Marquez is a consummately sophisticated painter, steeped in the traditions of modernism, yet irreverent enough to take poetic liberties in order to forge his own postmodern path throughout the thicket of art history. His admiration for Gauguin and Picasso have always been especially evident even as he took on his elders with an almost Oedipal zeal. In the case of Gauguin, some of his tributes at times verged on appropriation. Yet, Marquez’s own painterly personality has invariably prevailed, even in the compositions that were a veritable reprise of some of Gauguin’s signature themes. One of Marquez’s early paintings (or at least one of the first works this writer first encountered) was entitled Teki Tiki and it deconstructed familiar motifs of Gauguin with a bravado that can only be likened to the chutzpah with which Julian Schnabel earlier staked out his territory in the consciousness of critics and collectors. In his large oil canvas of comely Gauguin-like beauties lolling languorously in an exotic setting, yet painted in sinuous, flowing outlines and strident color areas characteristic of Marquez alone, this intrepid painter similarly staked his claim on our attention. At the same time, Marquez’s almost diagrammatic linear emphasis on the balances and the harmonious rhythms between the figurative and landscape elements, showed his appreciation of the older artist, not as the Barbarian or noble savage that he liked to fancy himself, but as the clandestine classicist that one critic rightly dubbed him. Here, Marquez seemed to be alerting us that for all his own brash painterly pyrotechnics, he too was building his aesthetic on a solid classical armature."