The Brooklyn Rail

When the act of painting expresses an artist’s inner freedom, the possibility of transcendence becomes reality: an open door to larger and more meaningful experiences. At minimum, transcendence allows consciousness to move beyond flesh-concerns like hunger, thirst, fatigue. More potent encounters bring you into contact with a sense of the everlasting. Such experiences feel timeless and call for a degree of sincerity that doesn’t fit neatly within the rubric of commercialism. You know it when you’re near it, and when I saw Steve Joy’s paintings, I knew immediately I was in the presence of paintings that were made to open doors of perception.

A selection of Joy’s paintings and works on paper are currently arranged throughout the studio of Lynch Eisinger Design Architects. Most were made over the course of a few years; the earliest were started in 2021. Joy’s compositions are rectilinear, with abutting diagonals and right angles. In addition to oil paint, the surfaces are built up with gold leaf, shellac, and beeswax—materials that harken back to earlier eras of painting. These are luminous works, grounded in a tension between the absorbent qualities of the wax and the reflective sheen of the shellac.

Joy’s work corresponds as much with medieval icon painting as it does with the sophisticated abstraction of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, or the inventive grids of Piet Mondrian. Consider a work such as Ozymandias (2022–25). A horizontal band of golden and bronze geometrical units spans the rectangular canvas from one edge to the other. The forms abut one another, establishing a solid pattern of connectivity. The title alludes to a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, ostensibly about ruins in a desert, and through that image the poet inspires reflection on the transience of power, on nature’s ultimate command of the landscape and all that is constructed upon it. As a meditation on the relation between nature and the built environment, Ozymandias is imbued with a sense of stillness and time out of mind.

The inventiveness of Joy’s practice is subtle and feels renewed from one canvas to the next. In Architecture of Silence (The Mayan) (2022–25) an island of gold leaf rests in a field of dark paint. It shimmers and glints when the light shifts. The density and darkness of the paint establish a powerful tension with the luminosity of the gold, which has the same warm tone as the morning sun. There are many forms of silence, many places in which it is required, many moods in which it may occur. This particular silence feels connected to the qualities of devotion and dedication that give sacred places—and practices—their energy.

If Joy’s paintings were merely mesmerizing, they would not be so effective. Here we find the distinction between the experience of being held spellbound and that of transcending consciousness. In both cases you feel a sense of remove, detachment, and awe. The difference is in the movement of the mind. Where the entranced mind is frozen, the transcendent mind rises to planes of being that stretch across eons. In a flash, the shiver of energies older than the American empire—or any empire—courses through your system, electric across your skin like a shot of cold, fresh air through a stuffy room. Such is the strength and possibility of Steve Joy’s paintings.