Judy Rifka, Five Step Painting, 2019
Paradigm-shifting. That is what it is about for me. You don’t just sit there and follow in everyone’s footsteps. You have to paint your way through it, and that takes time. I ask, what does everyone think that painting is about, that it doesn’thave to be about? What conclusions are they drawing that we are readyto break out of? - Judy Rifka, 2021
Rifka aims to capture line and forms positing in space as well its trajectory in space and its concomitant wake reverberating outward and within the four-walled holding cell —the 4'x4’ plywood panel used most often for these single shape paintings. These simple yet majestic forms are allowed to ‘dance’, she says, on the panel and by way of layering and building-up of handmade paint they slowly and painstakingly emerge as ‘morphing fields’, a body-form that ricochets within and without and builds momentum, a centrifugal-like force that emanates off the picture plane and exists markedly, agelessly, in the face of Postmoderism’s gaze.