Achieving a specific visual reality has been the goal of Audrey Keeperman during her career. It is not and cannot be her only goal, yet abstraction focuses upon this problem in a singular manner. Once achieved, however, whether in art or in life, reality has a way of evaporating, of becoming shopworn, less immediate and, finally, of being replaced by a new reality.
Abstraction today, especially as practiced by Audrey Keeperman,... exists as a disturbingly contemporary form, giving rise to the paradoxical situation in which the most traditional manner often has the most radical things to say. Keeperman’s paintings are not so much demonstrations of some “action” principle as they are luminous signs of moments of consciousness, moments which have their source in great depths and bear their own mysterious charge of poetry.
Spontaneity is clearly visible in the uneven opacity of the paint that records the movement of [her] brush and in the occasional drips of paint. A tension is generated by the conflict between Keeperman’s approach and traditional painting and drawing. Line occasionally models and defines edges and yet, in an ambiguous manner, loses touch with form. Color areas move back and forth so that spatial relationships are never clarified.
For artists like Audrey Keeperman, the canvas becomes an arena large enough in which to lose oneself. Her painting exists as a gestural record of the artistic process at a particular instant, regardless of how long it actually takes to complete the picture. In effect, her painting is painting about the act of painting.
- George S. Bolge, Museum of Art - DeLand
