“Steven Altman paints in long breaths and sudden flashes—
canvases cracking open under the pressure of looking,
thinking, remembering, forgetting.
Back and forth he goes—
abstraction slamming into figure,
figure dissolving back into the field—
no straight lines, no tidy conclusions,
just the raw nerve of perception circling itself.
Early paintings leave the door wide open:
huge white spaces,
a scribble like a thought mid-sentence,
a smear like evidence of touch.
Restraint here is a kind of devotion—
the refusal to overstate,
The courage to let silence speak.
Later, figures drift in,
words leak across the surface,
half-confessions, half-messages from nowhere.
Stories spark and burn out.
Meaning won’t sit still.
Ambiguity howls and stays alive.
Now the paint carries more gravity—
thicker, heavier, soaked in years of seeing.
But still no spectacle,
no shouting over the work—
Just attention,
time,
and the slow, holy act of looking again.”