The Philadelphia Inquirer , January 4, 2009

Abstract painter draws from two different styles
By Edith Newhall

Seeing Michael Kessler's latest paintings at the Schmidt Dean Gallery the other day - and realizing I'd visited shows of his since his 1984 New York debut at the Jack Tilton Gallery, and had read (and written) reviews of his work but had never come across anything he himself had to say about it - I decided to get to know him better before the next new year. I went to his Web site.

Among the evidence of a long and healthy career was an interview that writer and abstract painter Julie Karabenick had conducted with Kessler in 2007 for her online curatorial project, Geoform, which concerned contemporary geometric abstract painting. Some of the few things that I'd read or heard about Kessler were confirmed - that he grew up on a farm in Hanover, Pa., that the built-up and sanded-away surfaces of his abstract paintings were inspired by landscapes, and that he now lives in New Mexico

What I never would have guessed, though, is that Kessler grew up painting in the style of Andrew Wyeth (there is a picture of such a Kessler work reproduced with the interview). Or that, after discovering Brice Marden's lush encaustic paintings of muted stripes of color when he got to college, Kessler developed a style of his own that was informed by both the realist and the abstractionist.

Suddenly, his burnt-sienna tans, barn reds and bottle greens laid down in geometric patterns, and his deeply horizontal or vertical grids were not just his interpretations of landscape and the natural world, as I'd assumed, but were also the product of his appreciation of two entirely different artists and their bodies of work. The sublime, you're reminded, can come in diverse packages.

Kessler's new paintings continue his explorations of geometry, color and surface effect. (I learned that his process - among other things it involves spreading paint across a panel with a variety of trowels and skimmers he has invented - is one of the most important aspects of his work.) These are lighter, whiter and have more recognizably tilelike compositions than the paintings he showed here two years ago. His transparent reds and greens, and the ultramarine blue in a painting titled Gaskin, stand out with a jewellike clarity.

Kessler is so involved in his painting that the kind of epic change some artists require of themselves every few years seems to be satisfied in him by the smallest nuances. Only the loyalists notice, perhaps, but Kessler doesn't seem to care.