Essay by Giorgio Furioso

Terzo Piano is dedicated to showcasing the work of both major and under-recognized artists—those vital but often unheard voices that can wake us and move us and give expression to our times. 

Russell Katz is such an artist. 

In this, both the gallery’s and Katz’s first one-person show, visitors will be awakened to a trance-like mode of seeing and painting—one that takes photographs of the past and elevates them through a supreme act of attention. In the transition from photographic print to paint on canvas, the trees and explosions depicted by Katz undergo an almost mystical transformation. 

In the case of the trees, which took years to mature and less than seconds for photographer Eugène Atget to capture, their slow rendering by Katz’s patient, layered brushstrokes animates their textures and once again allows their forms to build over time. Whether seen up close as unfocused images or revealed with the clarity of architecture from a distance, these trees have the power and presence of portraiture.

With the explosions—events that themselves were nearly instantaneous—Katz takes photographic documents of World War I and again spends immense time with them, bringing us into a deeper relationship with their kinetic violence. These frozen moments of the past, which by causing death could stop time, come to life under Katz’s brush, forcing us to linger and absorb them in the present.

Both trees and explosions are connected by the artist’s stylistic integrity, but they have something else in common. In each it is as if the ground, the earth itself, is seeking the sky. And as the soil—upthrust and broken by the life force on the one hand and the death force on the other—becomes something other than itself, we the viewers see with new eyes.