Klar creates her paintings by pouring heavy industrial paint-wet into wet, wet on dry-on stretched canvas which she subsequently razors into, folds over and peels away exposing a rich and complex archeology comprised of vibrant color, bulbous drips, and jagged valleys of lacerated paint. The paintings appear in constant motion as if Klar’s careful but volcanic process is taking place at the moment of viewing. This process is evidenced in the painting Eye on Open where a forceful flow of cadmium red encroaches on a languid beige, engendering a violent explosion of form and color.

References to landscape, both the natural and the industrial, are evident in Klar’s new paintings. Often both are visible in the same composition. In Mother’s Happiness, for example, a turbulent and foamy ocean blue rolling onto a sandy beige ground is defiled by a virulent splash of orange. This could be seen as a seashore polluted by industrial waste, an attempt at cleaning an industrial wasteland, or the composition could be something else entirely, something more related to the body, an interior landscape. This ambiguity is the strength and purpose of Klar’s art, she wants to create abstract paintings that “hint at images knowable but unrecognizable or recognizable but unknowable.”

These implied images are critical to an understanding of Klar’s paintings. The image of the eye that Klar alludes to in Eye on Open-and the “eyes” in numerous other paintings in this exhibition-rests at the center of the composition, in the center of the paint’s turbulence. One can nearly recognize it as a human eye but it is the implication rather than the recognition that is important. Klar inserts the human element in her paintings to ground the viewer in experience—the experience of living in the twenty-first century a time of “over stimulation;” of the “the breakdown of barriers;” of the “reformation of alternatives;” and a time of individual choices that will define the “landscape” of the future.