Decades before the gifted Expressionist Mark Shecter was born in Baltimore, the battle for supremacy waged within modern art-- between color and line-- had been settled in favor of color. Shecter is a self-acknowledged heir of the bold painters from Gauguin and Van Gogh, to Matisse and the other Fauves (that is, "Wild Beasts," as the color-intoxicated revolutionaries around Matisse were nicknamed in the early years of this century), and finally to Chagall and Soutine. Of course, it is the oil medium, (which, in Renaissance, gradually replaced tempera and fresco), that makes this wonderful color freedom possible. Oil, which Shecter applies to his canvas either with his brush or his palette knife,dries slowly and allows him an enormous flexibility of handling, a free loose manner. (He often uses oil in combination with the twentieth-century technique of collage, in which colored bits of fabric or other materials are attached to the canvas in conjunction with the painted elements of the design; often the contrast of the real material with the painted surface provides a striking visual stimulant).

From his start, Shecter, who had first seen the unforgettable chromatic fireworks of the old and new masters in thehalls of the great museum of his native Baltimore, sought to make use of the magnificent potentialities of this medium, applied to coarse-grained canvas. In this he has followed the example of many earlier masters to coarse-grained canvas, who exploited the use of the "loaded" brush, with its multiplicity of visible strokes. The famous chronicler of early Italian artists, Giorgio Vasari, remarked that some of Titian's pictures had been executed "with thick brush strokes and color blobs" in such a manner that the viewer had to stand at a distance from the painting in order to make out the subject matter.

Shecter, born in 1943, could never go back to the per-Titian approach to painting. His rapid, uneven stroke reveals the character of his hand, his eye, his brain-- his status as a free modern man indebted only to inspiration, to spontaneity. As a representational artist who shuns purely abstract art-- that is, painting which attempts neither to depict natural objects nor even to take them as starting points for more or less nonfigurative designs--Shecter can uninhibitedly choose the shapes that appeal to him from the millions of sights offered to his inner eye and his imagination. Yet, at least in recent years, he has deliberately limited his repertoire to a few subjects: especially young men or women, seated or standing, mostly in the nude; interiors; vases of flowers; and landscapes. Where faces are shown, the features are only tentatively indicated. Apparently the artist feels, as many of us do, that a well defined individual object or space can serve as an excellent framework on which to array colors in a desired order, in a scheme that will ease the fears of the unprepared viewer and not suddenly exposed him to a chaos of mostly hot colors. In Shecter's pictures, the spectator's eye can linger for a while over heads, torsos, hands and legs, over chairs, sofas and vases, before it is encouraged to move onward to the essence of the work; the methodical juxtaposition of chromatic fields that create an informal "form"-- so carefully thought out before hand, it seems that all the evident passion and impatience in the application of the colors do not prevent the final subject from achieving balance, serenity and even majesty.

Here we have a cultured, educated man painting with energy and fury. The execution is deliberately untidy. Thecolor areas are composed of little valleys and hills that have no purpose except to express the "landscapist's"cheerful cast of mind and to intoxicate the viewer with their own absolutely natural merriment. The external "reality" of a given person, object or situation is drastically disturbed, yet his loosening of the outer fabric allows the spectator to get at the "truth", or emotional essence, of the rendered fact. The painted totality is suffused with a brightness and airiness that are swept by the winds of imagination and color.

But what does the artist want to accomplish? I do not think that any artist can answer such a question. Shecter's oils, with their violent detonations, their savage eruptions of colors, obviously reveal an almost unparalleled inner agitation. But the existence of many calm moods in between the storms can be deduced from his quiet, soft-hued interiors, the pictures dominated by large flowers or leaves, the rather simple and unexcited renditions of nude figures. As so many twentieth-century painters have had to find out, there is a danger involved in liberating color from a merely descriptive function so as to give it an emotional value of its own. All too often the color has been allowed to shout fortissimo in gusts of uncontrolled passion while the artist spreads the pigments onto the canvas like butter or marmalade. Some of the extreme French and German Expressionists learned, to their alarm, that this barbaric force was quickly spent and had the impact of a slap in the face rather than an appeal to heart and mind. When our own Action Painters had reached their limit and their uncouthness had become unbearable, they were replaced by younger colleagues who brought us, instead of more wildness and chaos, a more careful and sophisticated balancing of colors and forms- instead of the oversimplification of a rapid smear, a return to color harmonies, which are as essential to art as tonal harmonies are to music.

For Shecter, beauty appears to be closely related to measure. The primacy of his reason will channel passion and poetry without suppressing them. He rejects excess and upholding the dignity and decorum of deliberate forms. As the viewer can judge by the frequency and strength of the warm colors in Shecter's pictures--which invite us, whereas cold tones keep us at a distance--the artist is a rather warm person who sets up no barriers between himself and others, but encourages communication. Life-enhancing reds and yellows are fundamental to his palette. Shecter works in a state of complete exaltation.

But the Abstract Expressionist's violent gesture has not been enough for him. In a career that now extends over three decades, he has learned that what counts is not the success of an isolated detail, but the satisfactory arrangement of the entire picture, a harmonious balance between nature and spirit, the senses and the mind--in short, the creative Ego's transformation into impeccable harmonies.

My body responds favorably to the dynamic tensions generated by his pictures. They give me a joyous spiritual glow that will never be provided by the superficial splendor that can be achieved by a mere decorator with a pretty sense of color. Although by Shecter's own admission, Chagall and Soutine are closest to him of all the modern old color magicians, he surely accepts the definition of art formulated by that great twentieth-century painter, Henri Matisse, for whom art constituted an aid to the aesthetic mystery of the earthly paradise he inhabited. Shecter, too, places his emphasis on this world. So did the ancient philosopher, Epicurus, who remarked that pleasure was "the beginning and the end of the blessed life," and added, "I know not how I can conceive the good if I withdraw the pleasures of taste and of love, of hearing and of sight."

In a humble hut in Eastern Europe, more than two thousand years ago, a saintly Jewish thinker, poor and devout, arose to teach his brethren a better life within the confines of Judaism.

Curiously, his way of thinking had something in common with that of the modern "Fauve" Matisse. For Baal ShemTov--The Master of the Good Name--proclaimed:

"Pleasures are manifestations of God's Love."

-----From a Recent Critique