Commentary
“Kent Rush on the other hand, is able to convey a sense of mystery and contemplation with abstract paintings…His forte is his commitment to and understanding of his chosen medium of paper with its quiet elegance.”
–Donna Tennant, "Houston Letter," Artspace, Albuquerque, New Mexico 1986.
“…the ‘empty’ streets and highway embankments that are his subjects metaphorically denote the photograph as a field upon which meaning may be projected – even as these fields are simultaneously presented as already inscribed with meanings.”
–Virginia Rutledge, Social Studies: Public Monuments, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, New York, 1993.
“Nothing is diminutive in these understated works. We face strength and power. The hushed paintings of Giorgio Morandi have a similar quality of finality and immobility. It is an austere world, yet a world that glows and is luminous.”
–John Palmer Leeper, "Works on Paper - Kent Rush," (museum brochure), McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, 1977.
“Intensely quiet and perfectly balanced, these works recall oriental comparisons. Both in their philosophy of minimal perfection and introspective tranquility…”.
–Houston Inquirer, "Discoveries II," Lawndale Art and Performance Center, Houston, Texas 1986.
“A passing glance at his creations would reveal nothing – no hint of the subliminal complexity involved in creating such work, no inkling of the subtextual significance of discarded urban artifacts. But a sustained gaze holds the promise of understanding what lurks just below the surface.”
–Anjali Gupta, "Found Abstraction," San Antonio Current, San Antonio, Texas, June 14, 2001.
“I’d love to see a museum show focusing on these works, which look like what you might get if Whistler and Cy Twombly collaborated on a nocturn.”
–D. Britt, web blog
“The calligraphic draughtsmanship, the dark monotone of the paint and the infrequent streaks of faint color all combine in a restrained elegance which imposes upon the patient viewer a meditative calm not unlike that inspired by Ch’an or Zen painting.”
–Peter Boswell, "Urban Imagery," Artweek Magazine, San Francisco, California, July 31, 1982.
“Though his work is also low-key and subtle, it has the power to arouse strong emotion in viewers. By making the unobtrusive and undeserving his subjects, Rush questions one of the most fundamental precepts of fine art: that only the beautiful is worthy of our attention.”
–Dan Goddard, "Redefining Beauty," San Antonio Express News, San Antonio, Texas, July 19, 1998.
“They were objects that challenged the viewer to develop an individual interpretation. Like any good work of art, Rush’s large-scale photographs defied being explained with a single sentence or phrase.”
–Williams, Lyle. Kent Rush: A Retrospective, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, 1998.
“For me, these pictures are continually hovering on the edges of remembrance; something known yet not quite identifiable; powerful, provocative, and deeply persuasive.”
–Garo Antreasian, Kent Rush: A Retrospective, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas 1998.
“…there is something immensely gratifying about the unstudied simplicity of his images, the low-tech way they are made, the quiet curiosity they arouse, and the sensual physicality of the photograph itself.”
–Diana Roberts, “Kent Rush: InChoate and Sublime,” (exhibition brochure), Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas, 2010.
Rush’s appropriation of these early photographers’ techniques and methods, however, underscores his idiosyncratic differences from them; his work is contemporary, yet out of time... They used photography as a means of bringing the strange and distant into the viewer’s experience. Rush, on the other hand, reveals the strangeness in our own imagination.”
–Scott Andrews, Texas Arts + Culture, February, 2014
“Rush is concerned with the relative potencies of photographic presentation, from the intimate to overwhelming with regard to scale and from the precious to the (seemingly) discardable with regard to product. He is interested in … a quality of evocative expression that is conveyed by attitudes of emotional and physiological empathy regarding that form.”
–Ron Glowen, Kent Rush: Forms and Attitudes, (gallery brochure), San Antonio Art League, San Antonio, Texas, 1989.
“…in other words, his subjects achieve a kind of abstractness, the forms themselves as image having priority over where they came from or even what their functions as objects might be.”
–Jim Edwards, Matrix Series I, (gallery brochure), Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1993.
“Rush has immersed himself in an artistic process that has less to do with pictorial representation per se and more to do with ideas – as if Rush were trying to photograph the “aura” of a conceptual space within himself. … Yet Rush doesn’t catapult himself into the end zones of complex visual ‘embroidery’ but remains hovering on the threshold of what I would call ‘the moment of vision’; a highly suggestive yet vague inner realm where sight and insight begin a conceptual dialog about what it might be like to ‘reinvent the representation of the world’ from scratch.”
–Diane Armitage, THE Magazine, Santa Fe, New Mexico, December, 1993
The particular beauty achieved by these ... monochromatic prints, however, is far more abstruse and profound. The result is a series of painterly but minimalist compositions, reminiscent of Rothko, free from troublesome constraints of “good” or “bad” photography.
–Anjali Gupta, “Found Abstraction,” San Antonio Express News, San Antonio, Texas, June 4, 2001
“Kent Rush’s photographs … manipulate perception in the way they frame the world around us. His art makes monuments out of mole hills…”
–D. Dominic Lombardi, “dArt International,” Toronto, Canada, Fall 2006
