ROCKLAND, MAINE.-To stand before a monumental canvas of Samuel Gelber is to be embraced by the true colors and light of nature. From July 6 to August 3 at the Lincoln Street Center for Arts and Education in Rockland, Maine, experience the inimitable strength of Gelber’s art.

Two years since his last show in the same space, 21 – 18 – 12, which refers to the length in feet of the paintings exhibited, is a rare opportunity to be enveloped by his colossal works. The gallery’s three large walls will carry: Chaos and War, 2006-7 (5’ x 21’); Recollection of Sri Lanka, 2006 (4‘ x 18’); and Primeval Forest [dedicated to Dr. Charles L. Tyer], 2003 (5‘ x 12’).

Representational painters have forever labored to find order in nature, but Gelber releases nature – and himself – from such limitations. In his works, the overlapping, intersecting genuine disarray of the world – its profusion, abandon and radiance – are given unfettered life, as wild as the untamed apple orchards of Maine that were an early inspiration of his brush.

Carl Little reviewing (in the Maine Times) Gelber’s exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland in 2002 said: “ ‘The Season’s Suite’ is an act of liberation. One can’t help… shar[ing] the artist’s excitement as he explores new territories where individual details are less important than the power of the whole.”

In 1975 Gelber put aside representational aspects of objects for more elemental relationships. He embraced a construction that was less than “real.” His search was for space and relationships between one thing and another, more than fidelity to the look of objects.

Gelber says: “My paintings remain landscapes. There are seasons and forests, occasions for color, space, linear connects, ever expanding and contracting. As associations shift, new information is required, added to the surface without removing previous data. Working transparently and translucently, the entire process of construction is open for all to see, a spontaneous accumulation of reactions to the dialogue between artist and painting. Every surface mark (brush stroke) demands a response. I used to deliberate this, ponder the possibilities, most often concluding with my original impulse.”

These are not the untutored words of a young aspirant seeking to justify post-modern artistic folly; they are the reasonings of a seasoned professional with 50 years of exposure and experience, 40 years as a professor of art (a graduate of Brooklyn College, CUNY, who returned to teach there) and colleagues and contemporaries including Ad Reinhardt, Jimmy Ernst, Lois Dodd and Carl Holty.

The art critic Philip M. Isaacson wrote (in the Portland Herald), when Gelber exhibited in the Great Hall of the Portland Museum of Art in 2001: “Gelber’s paintings…could have anticipated the hall. There is a confidence about them that is almost a challenge to the room…. Gelber is a master with paint. At this scale, the tonality and the application are symphonic. They sweep across the surface in a valedictory summation of fine painting. The works show an assimilation of the influences – often seismic in their importance – of Cubism and more recent more abstract attitudes. Almost as impressive is [his] willingness to take risks…no small factor…at this scale. The pay-off is two works of art that will touch you with the beauty of their craft and their intellectuality and their sustained aesthetic intensity.”

Jenna Russell reviewed (in the Portland Phoenix) Gelber’s Hay Gallery 2002 exhibition, ‘The Liberated Landscape’ as follows: “Gelber communicates the darkness of thickets, the motion of water, the pink glow of twilight and the shimmer of mist, using little more than the painterly equivalent of pick-up sticks thrown at the canvas with painstaking precision over months and even years…. We’ve all seen plenty of representational landscapes. Its that familiarity – breeding as it does a kind of blindness, a belief that we’ve seen it all before – that makes our eyes and hearts prick up at this – its newness, its commitment to discovery and, even tougher with age, rediscovery.”

Gelber continues: “I gave up gravity, sources of light and cast shadow, object edges, defined dark and light, in effect freeing myself of the weight of expected requirements. The history of art can be a great weight. Italians have the burden of the Renaissance to carry. Can they jettison that history for open air? I unburdened myself and found fresh air.”

Lucas Pola, in his (Brunswick Times) review of the Portland Museum 2001 paintings, opined: “For contemporary landscape painter Samuel Gelber, no amount of words can match the canvas in its ability to capture emotion the natural world may evoke at a particular moment in time.… The harsh rapid brush strokes and dark hues…imbue the images with violent energy and motion; in each case the viewer gets the distinct feeling of being on the edge of a powerful storm.”

The artist reveals that in the current show “Recollection of Sri Lanka, painted last year in Maine, is about landscape, particular and universal, but Primeval Forest is a dream about what may never have existed – I hope poetry – that can be visualized only because it never was. Chaos and War, the longest work at 21 feet, is about the expenditure of earthly and human resources.”

Samuel Gelber was born and educated in Brooklyn, New York. For more than 40 years, he has spent a significant part of each year painting at his studio in Maine. He can be reached for commentary at rebleg@earthlink.net or 207-342-5509.

The Lincoln Street Center for Arts and Education is located at 24 Lincoln Street, Rockland, tucked between Summer and Limerock streets and routes 1 and 1A. For more information, visit the website at www.lincolnstreetcenter.org or call 207-594-6490.

The show will be on view from July 6 through August 3, 2007. The opening reception is on Friday, July 6, from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Samuel Gelber will speak about his work at 6:00pm. The Lincoln street Center’s Jean B. Chalmers Gallery, one flight up, is open Monday to Friday 9am to 1pm, and Wednesday, July 18 from 5pm to 8pm. Additional hours can be arranged by calling 207-342-5509.