The work of Aaron Garber-Maikovska is rooted in the interstice between performance, language, drawing and painting. Loosely reminiscent of dance, tai chi, sign language, and obsessive compulsive disorder, the complex idiom of gestures of which Garber-Maikovska performances are composed is the starting point for his pictorial works. Where his gestures seem to rub up against invisible, if interiorized limits in space, the mark making on his two-dimensional works collide with the limits of abstraction and language. Earlier works tended to focus on a single calligraphic, rapidly limned motif, compulsively repeated across different surfaces, the traces of which always referred back to his agitated body. With the advent of this new body of work, its pictorial nature opens up to include a whole host of figures and issues. At first glance, one might think of, say, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Brice Marden, but perhaps the operative, visual and conceptual reference here is Gutai, and more specifically Atsuko Tanaka, and her relationship with light and electricity. With these new works, the vibrancy of Garber-Maikovska’s palette is enhanced by the highly plastic white of the fluted polyboard upon which he applies his marks mostly with oil sticks, making it so that pictures are liable to resemble blazing fields of energy or screens across which tangles of volatile effulgence play. His galvanized, multi-hued brambles can be evocative of everything from quantum physics to neurological activity, as in the firing (or misfiring) of neurons. All that said, if Garber-Maikovska obliquely situates his work within recognizable trajectories of abstraction, it is not necessarily about borrowed legitimacy or even reference per se. What he makes, both on and off the “canvas” so to speak, has a lot more to do with how experience is always already embedded and hedged in by forms of language, whether they be of the body, the written word, or say gestural painting. How for all the codification that takes place in culture, the essential lies in and just beyond our finger tips, in and beyond language, in the incommunicable.

-Chris Sharp