Art critics and historians have long noted the analogy between the modern visual aesthetic and the style of Italian frescoes and altarpieces from the early Renaissance. The importance of this analogy normally resides in the formal qualities of recursive pattern, multiple perspectives, and the flatness of the pictorial surface. Ed Bielejec seemingly takes this analogy as his personal point of departure. In this artist’s work, images lie flat on the surface of the canvas. There is little spatial recession, foreshortening, or modeling of volume. The planes of floors and table tops are tilted unnaturally to better reveal their contents, and color is often laid down in precisely defined areas without tonal modulation. Even in his subject matter, Bielejec hearkens back to a world of ritual and belief.

Such allusions are, however, the means toward achieving a very unique and personal idiom. More than the formal qualities of early Renaissance art, this artist seems concerned with capturing the aura of mystery or suspense which these works often inspire in the modern viewer. It is an aura created by the interpenetration of the everyday and the mythic - by the coexistence of the religious icon and the realistic depiction of humanity. Bielejec’s portraits have a quality at once stylized yet deeply personal. Their appeal lies in our perceiving the humanity underlying the myth or, in the opposite case, our sensing the symbolic potential of the everyday.

Bielejec’s art is above all dramatic. Even in his portraits, we seem to have interrupted a temporal continuum in which there is a clear "before" and "after," about which we are left to guess. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in his remarkable drawing Mark Well the Night. Here we intervene in a moment of intense personal drama. Yet it is unclear whether the surroundings are a real physical ambiance or are a projection of a state of mind. The mystery is heightened by the large, dark mass, which may be anything from a pile of bed clothes to the palpable embodiment of the night itself. This work, like all of Bielejec’s work, challenges the viewer to provide the dramatic context.

Ed Bielejec is the executive director of the Mohawk Valley Center for the Arts. He was the recipient of the Rochester Art Club award for excellence in painting at the 1995 Finger Lakes Exhibit at the Memorial Art Gallery. He has also recently exhibited at Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica. He received his B.F.A. from Syracuse University. His work is in the collections of Princess Sophia of Romania, artist Jerome Witkin, and Syracuse University, as well as many other public and private collections. Bielejec lives in Little Falls, New York.
JH