Excerpt, Kostuik Gallery

Edmonton, Alberta born, Southern California based Verbicky presents his Citta Samanta series and Cranes sont en, or “skull”, paintings – works with three-dimensional surfaces that transcend traditional painting and venture into the realm of sculpture, utilizing vintage media, graphics, advertisements and obsolete branding materials. Debuting as well is Verbicky’s new Bhavanga Series, a transfer of this artist’s ability to create large wall murals onto canvas, employing hand painted and stenciled works that include the subtle use of crystalina (“diamond dust”) in between the movement of his signature horizontal bands.

“Verbicky’s works are a shared psychic location, which reminds me most of the insightful 1960’s notion that information systems overload creates pattern recognition. It was a somewhat visionary and strangely exotic concept back then, but in today’s digital world it is simply the everyday place we all live in. And it is for that salient reason that he strikes me as being both a masterful neo-pop artist and a gifted interpreter of the neo-baroque culture we currently occupy, the electronic world in which all consuming immersive spectacle has become the fabula, or story, of our daily lives. His pieces are thus futuristic relics, mosaic-like stage sets where words and images collide as tertiary mandalas. They are nearly four-dimensional emblemata for a new secular age of sensational saturation.“

Immersive: The Neo-Baroque Paintings of James Verbicky by Donald Brackett