Jake Berthot's early painting—including such shaped canvases as Greenpoint, with its irregular corners—was inspired by Minimalist art and geometric principles. In the mid-1970s, Berthot's painterly interest began to move from the intellectual to the emotional: "I became less interested in the idea," he has said of this shift,"and more involved with the feeling." Berthot's works from the late 1970s and the 1980s, such as Room, involve a pull between image and surface and between geometry and immateriality, which together create a kind of atmospheric abstraction.
Gallery label from Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection, May 3–July 10, 2006.