Hunt SLONEM'S obsessive and repetitive rendering of his subjects reflects his desire to explore issues of spatial complexity, compression and density in what the acclaimed Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler deemed "a consistent investigation of post-cubist abstraction."

The repetitive imagery also makes a reference to Andy Warhol. "I was influenced by Warhol's repetition of soup cans and Marilyn," says Slonem. "But I'm more interested in doing it in the sense of prayer, with repetition... It's really a form of worship."

Slonem is not interested in realism or, unlike Warhol, in advertising or media, and his paintings are neither narrative nor specific in detail. Rather, Slonem's work is deeply rooted in the act of painting. His jarring color choices, spontaneous mark making, and scratched hatch marks are the result of his ongoing fascination with the manipulation and implementation of paint.

For Slonem, cross-hatching has "a feeling of a tapestry, it's like weaving. I'm making colors bleed into each other, I'm revealing the under-painting. I'm making these marks to allow the light to come through, basically. So you're seeing about five levels of paint, instead of one."

It is this kind of devotion to the process of painting that prompted Henry Geldzahler to observe in 1993 that "Slonem is a painter, a painter's painter with an enormous bag of technical tricks which become apparent to the viewer the longer he stands before the work."

(Essays: From various websites with specific insights and quotes from Henry Geldzahler and John Rothchild.)