Art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky speaks about ideas relevant to painting today with specific examples from Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye.

For a long time now, painting has been more concerned with the image rather than with representation–that is, with its own construction rather than the construction of resemblances to the observed world. Lately, however, a number of younger painters–Victoria Gitman among them–have rediscovered the observation and transcription of appearances as a powerful resource for painting, and they are doing so without giving up the self-reflectiveness, intellectual lucidity, and emotional content the art gained through a century of cubism, expressionism, abstraction and so on.

Schwabsky, art critic for The Nation and contributor to Artforum, has authored several books including Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2002) and his latest collection of essays Words For Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice (2013).