Jonathan Goodman reviews the recent exhibition Eric Holzman: Small Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York.

Goodman writes: "Painting, which is far from dead, is in the hands of Eric Holzman singingly alive… Holzman bravely undertakes the recording nature in all its particularity, a stance still capable of engaging, even moving the viewer in the transcendental tradition of American writing and art. The curving forms of the trees fill Holzman’s art in ways that intensify the small dimensions of the paintings, which can be seen as serving an idealized vision of nature—even if the foliage is accurately rendered, with an eye to actual form. In many ways the persistence of Holzman’s interest in nature, in art-world circumstances that heavily favor technology and conceptual underpinnings, starts to look like a brave move to keep alive something of our relations with the outside world, which sadly we are changing beyond recognition."