BAKERSFIELD, CA.- The colorfully explosive work of LUDVIC just opened for exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art. LUDVIC, who was born in Egypt, received his art education in Europe, and established his initial reputation in Canada, before coming to the United States in the mid-eighties. Ludvic’s painterly repertoire of marks and strokes is most varied. Yet, even his most impetuous-seeming gestures serve as structuring devices – most particularly the intermittent units of regular interwoven stripes, placed close together which function in a manner of crosshatching. He intermingles these structural elements with bursts of brilliant color that, in contrast to the explosive gestures of Abstract Expressionism, lend his compositions a sense of implosion. This inward unfolding creates a dynamic canvas of forms battling pattern and color. Ludvic often works with a palette knife to apply pigment straight from the tube, building up dense, taut concentrations of color and texture. The addition of asphalt to his pigments makes the surfaces even more tactile than most enhancing the physicality and presence of his canvases. Placing his sculptural forms in real space requires great thought and something less instantaneous than the painterly gesture. To place a shape of cut and welded steel is also a highly intuitive act. The artist’s perception regarding material and physicality whereby the making of one shape, color, or line coincides with another and that a formal coherence becomes the result.

Ludvic’s dedication to abstract form is not only a matter of play but also a matter of adherence to the principle that his vocabulary of abstract form can also become the manifestation of a new reality, another way of thinking about form in relation to nature. While abstract art may appear as a surface manipulation (in the case of painting) or a kind of surreptitious indulgence in spatial relations (as in constructivist sculpture), it contains something more.