About the Artist

---

Art Matters

By Burton Wasserman

Roz Perlmutter who lives and works in South Florida is a dedicated visionary. From the center of her sinews, outward to the entire whole of her being, she registers the deepest of feelings in brood patches and nervous strokes of daring color. Together, they tingle with electrified energy and sustained esthetic power.  

Perltmutter’s principal area of focus is the human figure. often presented in the nude and rendered with on incisive expressionist idiom. Bold in treatment and free of any gimmicky hocus-pocus, her passages of pastel anal powdered pigment (combined with appropriate fluid vehicles compounded by the artist herself) give shape to a natural drive for realizing form with infinite gusto and independence. As such. It reflects an approach that is turbulently vigorous. enthusiastically buoyant and never timid.  

In one example after another, she offers o courageous flowering of spontaneous primal impulses, brought to fulfillment in a unique and personal vocabulary, alive with unvarnished candor and a sensitive touch that is unmistakably her own.  

The foundations of Perltmutter’s venturesome style recall paintings by such artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller and Emile Nolde. Historically, they were all associated with the Brucke movement in Europe during the early 20th century. Like her. they emphasized the sincere expression of internal sensation, the dramatic use of selective simplification and the employment of distortion for the sake of heightening the emotional impact of their pictures.  

Following in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh and Eduard Munch. the major achievement of their efforts was the liberation of daringly conceived artforms. Heroically, they structured images set free from the cloying restrictions imposed upon the creatively oriented artist by the enforcement of sterile academic restrictions and the perpetuation of conservatively established guidelines for bring artwork into being.  

Perlmutter is a self-taught artist with a background of professional experience in the field of psychology. Responding on a visceral level to existential issues in the overall spectrum of the contemporary human condition, she acknowledges the widespread existence of events that wear on the nerves and the patience of people far and wide. By avoiding a narrow focus on episodes covered pictorially everyday by print and broadcast media, she comes to terms with reality at large in images, that encompass what it means to be alive at a time when international hostilities, other assorted disturbing circumstances and the dehumanizing impact of mushrooming technology are facts of life from which no one can hide. Typically, her nude reclining women in search of restful tranquility, marionettes in proximity with each other and other constellations of figures ore metaphorical echoes of everyday situations with which everyone may identify in one way or another.

For me, her art is music for the restless soul vibrating feverishly inside the envelope of our skin. It nourishes us where all our nerve endings come together. And it confirms the fact that each of us is a remarkable and extraordinarily complex human being.