On The Verge submission - Geza Brunow

Excerpt by D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit Weekly, New Orleans (June, 2006):

"A painter born in Berlin of Yugoslav parentage, Brunow moved to New Orleans...because 'there was magic in the air.' His ghosts and decadent beauty are apparently part of the magic, and Brunow translates such impressions into colorfully wistful paintings...but not everything is entirely as it seems. Vessel of the Ancients is a loosely painted and rather impressionistic view of what looks like an antique pot. Cracked about the rim and featuring some mottled floral designs, it has clearly seen better days, but it also has a vaguely sinister vibe. It seems that, when turned upside down, the vessel becomes a skull, albeit one that has apparently also seen better days. Chrysalis is a richly-hued painting of flowers...buildings, houses and picket fences, all disproportionate to each other and floating in a florid nimbus like something Marc Chagall might have dreamed up after a couple of Pimm's Cups at the Napoleon House. While the larger paintings are loose, woozy and vaguely hallucinatory, his ink and watercolor images of local houses reveal a linear precision that is no less whimsical. Created from memory while evacuated, they infuse local Victorian shotgun architecture with hints of ancient Belgrade, Balkan villages and other points East in a mythic architecture of the mind--a local neighborhood where Creole goes global."