Henry Codax
July 10 - August 24, 2012
Opening Reception July 10, 6 - 8 pm press release
Long Suffering
Henry Codax
July 10 – August 24, 2012
Opening Reception: July 10, 6 – 8 pm
Every painter of monochromes comes to the form by his or her own
idiosyncratic route.
-Antonio Clifton
Gazing from the crow’s nest of a ship, silent and alone, great novelists like
Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad had nothing to see but the sea. Their solitary
meditations, undistracted by any stimulus, eventually welled up and burst open
as stories so thorough and considered that they contained whole worlds. The
reclusive painter Henry Codax does likewise. Alone, cruising the canvas with his
hand, he reflects the contemporary world using the dexterity of an old master.
Codax is a painter of tradition, a connoisseur of brushes and pigments and
canvas. Like a man at sea, he has stored up his thoughts and experiences and
has long cultivated his artistic faculties. In his new works, Codax’s eye
translates his daily hermetic life into broad expanses of unadulterated chroma:
his teacup and saucer at 3 pm as the white and pale grey of two large squares;
his longing for someone’s lithe body clad in chartreuse at the deli; the cyan
breadth of the sky made as a vertiginous rectangle; red wrappers on glass
bottles collected by a garbage-picker in the street outside his window.
As he watches our world, Henry Codax makes it singular, tangible, but unfixed.
His paintings are refuges, snapshots of pure experience lifted from workaday
living and made transcendent. Consider that, the next time you glance at the
body of the person you desire, at the sky. How would you make that feeling
into a plane seven feet tall that a soul would want to live in?
Martos Gallery
540 West 29th Street New York, NY 10001
For further information please contact gracie@martosgallery.com or 212-560-0670
