Eric Zammitt

Particles and Waves

February 9 - March 4, 2003

Timetables: The paintings of Eric Zammitt
By, Carmine Iannaccone

Whatever happened to the future? Not the chronological phenomenon, which we would like to think is as much around the corner as it ever was, but the idea of the future that the people, only one generation ago, found so exhilarating and laden with promise- not just tomorrow, but a better tomorrow, improved by technology. That spirit of progress reached popular consciousness, in part, through the sleek lines, clean look, and new materials of Modernist design and architecture, as well as through related movements in the fine arts that pushed the Modernist envelope from Hard-edged abstraction, to Minimalism, to Light and Space.

The paintings of Eric Zammitt follow closely in this trajectory, but like the art of several other formalist painters currently working on the West Coast, including Linda Besemer, Yunhee Min, Ingrid Calame, and Alicia Beach, it also marks a significant departure from the tradition, and reads as something of a course correction. Earlier forms of abstraction were beholden to an expectation of transcendence on the part of painting, either through the harmonious geometries of Karl Benjamin, the visual conundrums of frank Stella, or the intangibilities of Robert Irwin. The obligation of painting was to address the problem of immanence, to depict reality in a perpetual state of becoming.