jef bourgeau / abstract

It would be hard to think of an American artist more in sync with the current cultural moment than Jef Bourgeau. His digital canvases are big, blunt, rumpled fragments of color and high-velocity, giddy geometrics.

His paintings have a simple presence, often belied by a woozy frontality. He seems to be thinking about how some areas of a Cy Twombly or a Ken Noland painting fit together and others don't. In his own work, he attempts to recover that unsteady instant of eureka as opposed to those misfired ones. Success or not, Bourgeau's work always seems fresh. They are a jumping-off point rather than the culmination of something.

The speed of digital media can also stimulate what Milan Kundera calls the “pleasure of slowness.” Bourgeau’s current work embraces this contrariness, with all the purity and rigor of old abstraction but without its loaded baggage. His cybered-up trompe l’oeil paintings regenerate abstract art’s DNA into a sort of hypnotic vertigo mixed with a feckless reverie.

- Jerry Saltz, A Zombie On The Wall