Interview With Peter Frank by Lark

About "Reaching Inside" Competition Results

Lark: What is different in this competitions and what impressed you in it?

Peter Frank: What impressed me in this competition is that we have very complex thinkers: Kaloust (Guedel), Savva-Kornyshev, Gwen Samuels, Jasmin Etemadi. They are willing to break away from generic practice in order to respond to the contemporary world using different media and techniques.

In Savva Kornyshev’s case it’s the complexity and rhythm of his imagery, influenced by his Eastern European sensibility.

In Kaloust’s case it is his graphic power and the intensity of his imagery, the way he mixes his media, using photo, painting and sculpture techniques.

In Gwen Samuels’ case it is her graphic rhythm and interesting technique mixing photography, computer techniques and textile. This is something she did not invent, but she has made it her own. It’s strong as image and as composition, and it is clever.

Anne Marie Rousseau uses in her drawings a very simple technique, but realizes very complex imagery, density and movement. Also, I like her sensous textures and the uggestion of the organic not being organic.

Jasmin Etemady’s strength is in her strong combination of painting and collage. She is a complex thinker with a powerful but at the same time subtle political edge. Beauty is not enough, but it is very important, and Etemady’s images are also strangely beautiful.

Joshua Elias’ abstract painting is at once gestural and controlled, driven as much by a rich color sense as by a sense of formal dynamics. His formula is hardly unique, but his realization of this by-now traditional approach is particularly distinctive. It simply doesn’t look quite like anyone else’s.

There’s another Joshua in this mix, Joshua Y’Barbo, but his work could hardly be more different than Elias’. Y’Barbo works with technical, technological, evidently computer-generated imagery, speaking of the way we try to quantify and even commodify our lives. But he doesn’t argue against its lack of humanity as he tries to humanitize it, to bring it down – or up – to our scale.

I was quite taken with Jolanta Badyna-Budny’s grainy, mysterious images, perhaps because they take a surrealistic view of the urban landscape,.but I think even more because they deliberately confuse dream and reality, above-ground and underground, even photography and hand-rendered technique. In her Kafkaesque world, nothing is as it seems.

Natasha Kostan’s abstractions are colorful and rhythmic, like Joshua Elias’, but she orders her non-objective world along much more architectonic lines than he does, and her use of collage enlivens both her surfaces and her compositions.

Monika Steiner practices a less aggressive kind of abstraction, one rooted in nature and preferring organic tones to rainbow hues. There is a touch of surrealism here, but it is as much in the atmosphere of gentle mystery as it is in the sense of metamorphosis.


Kaleeka Bond’s handsomely described naturalism places real people in real contexts. In fact, they seem a little bit more real than they did last year, a little more contemplative and a little less active. Maybe she is moving away from theater and more towards philosophy.

Lark Gallery Online