Arte Fuse
by Jonathan Goodman
June 15, 2017
Kit White, a painter of indisputably lyric accomplishment, is currently showing at two venues: FreedmanArt and the Institute of Fine Arts. Kit White, a painter of indisputably lyric accomplishment, is currently showing at two venues: FreedmanArt and the Institute of Fine Arts. White, now a mature artist is a long resident of New York City, where he has practiced a distinctive form of poetic suggestion, in which rickety, skeletal structures occupy the center of the composition, whose surrounds indicate a lonely landscape. Interestingly, though, his efforts do not necessarily derive from the New York School—even though White showed twice with Betty Parsons, a major gallerist of the movement, in the late 1970s. Certainly, he recognizes the fact that the abstract artists working shortly before him filled their paintings with inchoate, nonobjective form, intending to portray the strong emotion resulting from that form. But White is looking not so much for an expressionist intensity as he is interested in communicating a view that derives from a philosophical outlook and earlier history. A reader of contemporary poetry as well as a former student of Latin and Greek, White recognizes a time when culture was slower—a time when the act of painting was mediated by a knowledge of what preceded it, and when poetry was actually read.