These paintings were created over the past year and reveal the influence of abstract expressionism on his work, which makes sense, since Alarid was the recipient a couple of years ago of a prestigious award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. The foundation was named for husband-and-wife abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Alarids recent style seems to refer, at least broadly, to the early work of Pollock.
The Empirical: paintings represent a continuation of Alarids efforts of the last five years or so. They are extremely dense in their compositions, with the artist applying a wide array of smears, dots, smudges, lines and scribbles, one on top of another. This chaotic approach is used both to flesh out and to obscure Alarids ambiguous subject matter. His pictures are covered with disparate images, including line drawings of eyes, stars and checkerboards and, more often than not, hidden somewhere among all these things, theres the face of a woman.
The use of metallic paints and amber glazes lends a satisfyingly luxurious quality to these paintings, and as a result, they gleam like jewels. In fact, they could be called downright decorative -- and, as this exhibit reveals, thats no insult.
