"One can no more look away from Robert Feintuch’s paintings than from a miracle — or a shocking impropriety. In dialogue with Philip Guston and Samuel Beckett, Italian frescos and TV cartoons, Feintuch’s work unites and juxtaposes high and low, humor and dread, playfulness and gravitas. He may depict the ethereal pastel blue sky and glorious puffy white clouds of Renaissance paintings, but instead of Michelangelo’s heroically muscled divine Arm endowing Adam with life, Feintuch depicts one that is stick-like and dimpled, stretching down from on high like a rubber band to proffer us a fire bucket — or brandish a punitive cudgel. Instead of Adam’s human perfection, we must face our own embarrassingly exposed, inexorably aging, unglamorous and unglamorized physicality. Feintuch’s existential despair is leavened and sharpened by the witty bemusement of his visual and verbal puns, such as the scattering of tiny and shriveled mineral and anatomical “stones,” his pontificating Pontiff, or the mundane “line” being unglamorously “toed.” But Feintuch’s humor is humane as well as mordant, revealing the truth of our selves to ourselves with a wry, sorrowful, sympathetic grin."
-- Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann
